I too can quote Hinton -from memory and without a link. I remember him saying that the next big thing in AI will come from a grad student who distrusts everything he (Hinton) has ever said. Unfortunately, I won't be that grad student- I haven't heard everything that Hinton has ever said.
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Like, my point is not about whether you can find the odd person trying to solve intelligence with grammars, or what were GOFAI conferences still harbour GOFAI research in the corners, my point is that a) these approaches don't work as a way to actually tackle AI, the problem, b) the vast majority of the field does not take them as seriously as a method of doing so, regardless of other uses, and c) therefore it's natural, not ‘impossible’, to gain AI expertise without having much care for those parts of the field.
At this point I think we're just hopelessly talking past each other. Of course I know about Deep Blue. I didn't know about MYCIN, but, like, “MYCIN was never actually used in practice”, so I don't feel particularly bad about missing that one.
But neither of those challenge my point. If you want to go back in time 30 years, then sure, if you want to be an AI expert, then you have to know GOFAI. That's what the ‘OF’ stands for.
> I know the literature. It's my job.
Yah I read the literature too. (Albeit it seems a very different subset.) That's not an argument though.
> Or, you know, ask any AI researcher :)
OpenAI is explicitly about the path to AGI, https://openai.com/about/.
DeepMind was also founded to tackle AGI (no source, sorry).
Geoffrey Hinton thinks NNs will get to AGI https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/03/1011616/ai-godfa....
Even in your own link, Yoshua Bengio is saying that this is a path to AGI, it's just not there yet.
> Which "GOFAI" conferences are majority NNs?
I said “historically GOFAI conferences”, so eg. AAAI.