Haha, this is very true. Symbolic AI is dead for the most part, but I feel like it was an issue of labor scale. There weren't enough code fluent humans to embed all the knowledge. I do think symbolic AI will see a resurgence though. I could see it being a part of enrichment to current models. I don't think it's the case that we'll see diminishing returns THEN reach for symbolic AI. I think that adding a symbolic layer could greatly enhance their effectiveness today and make the models cheaper (by being performant with fewer params and therefore cheaper to run and serve). You already kind of see clues of this as creating graphs / ontologies as part of a RAG or retrieval phase are proven to improve performance of these AI models in specific domains.

At the same time, back then the thought was that symbolic AI was the answer, and for sure Hofstadter's understanding of intelligence, and the emergence of consciousness from matter, had everything to do with symbols. He's talked about this, very interesting, although this is not a 'feel good' artifact from the Hofstadter canon lol. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6e08RnJyxo&t=227s