Basically every academic AI researcher in history was doing what you described. The AI industrialists stopped caring 6 years ago once they realized LLMs seem to have been the only thing in 80 years that actually seems to work at any useful level.
There are plenty of pioneering scientists who are either returning to actual AI research (Yann Lecun, Ilya, etc), and plenty who never left (Richard Sutton) who are doing exactly what you are talking about.
That is not true. Alan Turing did not view things that way, his test would say that a dog has zero intelligence. Neither did any of the MIT Lispers. And neither do Lecun or Sutskever or Sutton! They are all focused on human intelligence. None of them are even slightly concerned about an AI which is intelligent before it learns any language.
> the only thing in 80 years that actually seems to work at any useful level
This isn't true either! Mathematica / Maple / etc are "old-fashioned AI" and they obviously work. The Lisp expert systems were also useful, though less so than an LLM.
??? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvibIstOn_E his arguemtn here is clearly built around using some sort of sensory data to build a model of the world like humans (animals) do. also you clearly decline to mention Lecun who has made this point ad-infinitum
> This isn't true either! Mathematica / Maple / etc are "old-fashioned AI" and they obviously work. The Lisp expert systems were also useful, though less so than an LLM.
i personally find it very strange that non-deep learning AI approaches which essentially boiled down to a giant bundle of if statements, or some very simple statistical modeling were called AI in the first place.