Expert systems actually work and, while we don’t normally even call them “expert systems” any more, are important in basically every domain – “business rules engines” are generalized expert system platforms, and are widely used in business process automation.)
Despite how well they work, and early optimism resulting from that about how much further they’d be able to go, they ran into limits; it is not implausible that the same will turn out to be true for LLMs (or even transformer-based models more generally.)
> We’re at the beginning of LLMs, and systems which use LLMs as components. This is the fun time for the technology. Ten years out, it will be boring, like Java.
…and expert systems. (And, quite possibly, by then they will have revealed their fundamental, intractable llimitations, like expert systems.)
I work in an industry where expert systems were a flop. I have seen the presentations and memos from 30 years ago that promised a future of fully automated facilities and drastically increased engineer productivity. In the past 30 years we basically realized none of the promised capabilities. You have to really stretch the definition of expert system in order to include the systems in use today. In fact, a good portion of the automation systems in the facilities are more than 30 years old.
Expert systems were a “flop” only in the sense that they were so apparently promising early on (like in the same early phase as we are in now with transformer architectures/LLMs) that people projected, well, the same kind of universal and unlimited capabilities now being proejected for technologies based around transformers, so lots of projects in virtually every domain were undertaken with wild expectations. It turns out that expert systems were wildly successful in terms of what they were useful for, but even so, but, even so, lots of those efforts failed because the expectations were so ludicrously high.
> In fact, a good portion of the automation systems in the facilities are more than 30 years old.
Not sure what you are trying to say with that, given that the expert system hype wave started about 60 years ago and and petered out between 50-40 years ago.
The rule-based systems resurrection ~25 years ago (while seeing a much wider array of practical applications developed) had much more modest expectations, and though it was centered around expert systems as the enabling central component of broader systems, almost never used the term “expert systems”.(Though I wonder if you are thinking more about fuzzy logic, because while it wouldn’t be significant for unqualified “expert systems” as such, the timing would kind of make sense for saying something about fuzzy logic systems, whether fuzzy expert systems or neurofuzzy systems, both of which had a bit of hype cycle starting in the mid-80s which, IIRC, saw lots of attempts at industrial applications with mixed success in the 1990s.)
Expert systems actually work and, while we don’t normally even call them “expert systems” any more, are important in basically every domain – “business rules engines” are generalized expert system platforms, and are widely used in business process automation.)
Despite how well they work, and early optimism resulting from that about how much further they’d be able to go, they ran into limits; it is not implausible that the same will turn out to be true for LLMs (or even transformer-based models more generally.)
> We’re at the beginning of LLMs, and systems which use LLMs as components. This is the fun time for the technology. Ten years out, it will be boring, like Java.
…and expert systems. (And, quite possibly, by then they will have revealed their fundamental, intractable llimitations, like expert systems.)