Hacker News Reader

Given that Norvig was one of the authors of "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data"[1] and his famous statistical spell checker[2] are both about showing how rule and symbolic intelligence doesn't work I don't think your thesis is quite correct.

[1] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

[2] https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html

I think they referred to him internally which makes sense. I follow him on LinkedIn and most of the posts are about GCS AI services, which is external facing.

Basically sales pitches...

When I was at Google I never heard Norvig’s name in connection with anything. At any internal AI conferences Jeff Dean would be present, Kurzweil, etc., but never Norvig.

Rule based and all was long ago before data was so much abundant. Or in other words before big data era.