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Cyc

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Re: Cyc

#31

Post by _bxg1 »

kick wrote: post #29
brundolf wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employee of Cycorp here. A few thoughts: - At least right now, we have a good amount of common-sense information about the world (I don't know when "last time" was for you). - That said, we have a lot of highly specialized knowledge in various domains, so if you took a random sample of the knowledge base (KB) it may not be as common-sense-centric as you'd hope. But the KB is also incredibly large, so that doesn't mea…

OpenCyc hasn't been a thing for something like a decade, so even if "last time" was yesterday, it'd still be on outdated information (because Cycorp keeps things proprietary, hidden and unauditable). Do you know when they last pushed it out? It's been a while.

It has indeed been a while, unfortunately. I don't know the exact date. Some of us here are trying to push for a revival of OpenCyc or something similar, to democratize things and get third-party developers playing with the system, but for now OpenCyc is not really supported.

Re: Cyc

#32

Post by jkaptur »

_bxg1 wrote: post #26
jey wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some interesting examples of common-sense that has been formalized and encoded?

One of our primary test suites is what we call "Common Sense Tests". They comprise a set of common-sense questions that require some leaps of reasoning to answer, and we use them as a metric of our common-sense knowledge. So for example: Would a human dislike touching a/an incandescent bulb while the electric lamp is powered on? Yes. ?HUMAN dislikes being a performer in the ?TOUCHING. • Embodied agents dislike perfor…

So to "change a lightbulb", so to speak, the system decides something like "turn off the lamp first". But then the evaluation above says that the human would not dislike touching the bulb, but, in reality, it's still too hot.

So you could incorporate some kind of cooling rate, then change the above to "When an incandescent bulb has been on x of the last y minutes it is too hot to touch".

This all seems just impossibly complicated (not that I can think of something simpler!) - am I missing anything?

Re: Cyc

#33

Post by kick »

_bxg1 wrote: post #31
kick wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenCyc hasn't been a thing for something like a decade, so even if "last time" was yesterday, it'd still be on outdated information (because Cycorp keeps things proprietary, hidden and unauditable). Do you know when they last pushed it out? It's been a while.

It has indeed been a while, unfortunately. I don't know the exact date. Some of us here are trying to push for a revival of OpenCyc or something similar, to democratize things and get third-party developers playing with the system, but for now OpenCyc is not really supported.

Good luck! That's a really genuinely exciting prospect. I hope you succeed!

Re: Cyc

#34

Post by brundolf »

dmix wrote: post #27
catpolice wrote: post #15

I worked for Cycorp for a few years recently. AMA, I guess? I obviously won't give away any secrets (e.g. business partners, finer grained details of how the inference engine works), but I can talk about the company culture, some high level technical things and the interpretation of the project that different people at the company have that makes it seem more viable than you might guess from the outside. There were s…

Two easy ones for you: 1) How did they manage to make money for so long to keep things afloat? I'm guessing through some self-sustainable projects like the few business relationships listed in the wiki? 2) What's the tech stack like? (Language, deployment, etc)

Current Cycorp employee here.

1) One-off contracts, sometimes with ongoing licenses, from various large organizations who have use cases for inference. We did a lot of government contracting for a while; now we mostly stay in the private sector.

2) An in-house dialect of Common Lisp that compiles to Java (it predates Clojure). Deployment is still fairly ad-hoc, but we build Containers.

Re: Cyc

#35

Post by _bxg1 »

jkaptur wrote: post #32
_bxg1 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of our primary test suites is what we call "Common Sense Tests". They comprise a set of common-sense questions that require some leaps of reasoning to answer, and we use them as a metric of our common-sense knowledge. So for example: Would a human dislike touching a/an incandescent bulb while the electric lamp is powered on? Yes. ?HUMAN dislikes being a performer in the ?TOUCHING. • Embodied agents dislike perfor…

So to "change a lightbulb", so to speak, the system decides something like "turn off the lamp first". But then the evaluation above says that the human would not dislike touching the bulb, but, in reality, it's still too hot. So you could incorporate some kind of cooling rate, then change the above to "When an incandescent bulb has been on x of the last y minutes it is too hot to touch". This all seems just impossibl…

It is very complicated, yes. The goal is to be AI's "left brain"; the slower, more methodical (and explainable!) end of the spectrum. We see our place as being complementary to ML's "right brain", fast-but-messy thinking.

I will say also that our focus on "common sense" means we make deliberate choices about where to "bottom out" the granularity with which we represent the world; otherwise we'd find ourselves reasoning about literal atoms in every case. We generally try to target the level at which a human might conceive of a concept; humans can treat a collection of atoms as roughly "a single object", but then still apply formal logical to that object and its properties (and "typical" properties). In one sense it isn't a perfect representation, but in another sense it strikes the right balance between perfect and meaningful.

Re: Cyc

#36

Post by yters »

Why is there never any fundamental research whether human intelligence is even computable? All these huge, expensive projects based on an untested premise.

Re: Cyc

#37

Post by yters »

coldcode wrote: post #4

While this approach might seem dated and strange, at some point something will begin to approach the ability to do general learning like a human. I just wonder how long we have to wait.

What if general learning is uncomputable?

Re: Cyc

#38

Post by yters »

magnifique wrote: post #18
vanniv wrote: post #3

I can't believe this is still a thing. Then again, I felt the same way when I studied it at university almost 20 years ago. It was pretty obviously a pipe dream then, too.

I thought so on first glance too, but from what I've heard from someone who worked there, it's working software and it makes a lot of money. That's the opposite of a pipe dream, even if far short of AGI.

Is it making real money, or speculative money on the moon shot premise that AGI will rule it all if successful?

I worked at an AI company before, and it was the latter.

Re: Cyc

#39

Post by Ididntdothis »

yters wrote: post #36

Why is there never any fundamental research whether human intelligence is even computable? All these huge, expensive projects based on an untested premise.

I think it’s pretty certain that we can improve a lot. If that leads to human intelligence or something else we don’t know. But it’s worth working on improving things and trying different approaches even if the final result isn’t known.

Re: Cyc

#40

Post by radeklew »

yters wrote: post #36

Why is there never any fundamental research whether human intelligence is even computable? All these huge, expensive projects based on an untested premise.

Why wouldn't it be? It seems to me that at worst we would have to wait for computers to become as powerful and complex as a human brain, and then simulating human intelligence would be a matter of accurately modelling the connections.

Is there doubt as to whether a neuron can be represented computationally?

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