Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

outsiderart.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 145 posts

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#3

Post by mepian »

I wonder what is the closest thing to Cyc we have in the open source realm right now. I know that we have some pretty large knowledge bases, like Wikidata, but what about expert system shells or inference engines?

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#4

Post by nextos »

mepian wrote: post #3

I wonder what is the closest thing to Cyc we have in the open source realm right now. I know that we have some pretty large knowledge bases, like Wikidata, but what about expert system shells or inference engines?

There are some pretty huge ontology DBs in molecular biology, like GO or Reactome.

But they have never truly exploited logic-based inference, except for some small academic efforts.

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#5

Post by toisanji »

I would love to see a Cyc 2.0 modeled in the age of LLMs. I think it could be very powerful, especially to help deal with hallucinations. I would love to see a causality engine built with LLMs and Cyc. I wrote some notes on it before ChatGPT came out: https://blog.jtoy.net/understanding-cyc-the-ai-database/

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#6

Post by niviksha »

mepian wrote: post #3

I wonder what is the closest thing to Cyc we have in the open source realm right now. I know that we have some pretty large knowledge bases, like Wikidata, but what about expert system shells or inference engines?

There are a few symbolic logic entailment engines that run atop OWL the Web Ontology Language, some flavors of which which are rough equivalent of Cycs KBs. The challenge though is the underlying approaches are computationally hard so nobody really uses them in practice, plus the retrieval language associated with OWL is SPARQL which also has little traction.

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#7

Post by observationist »

mepian wrote: post #3

I wonder what is the closest thing to Cyc we have in the open source realm right now. I know that we have some pretty large knowledge bases, like Wikidata, but what about expert system shells or inference engines?

OWL and SPARQL inference engines that use RDF and DSMs - there are LISPy variants like datadog still kicking around, but there are some great, high performance reasoner FOSS projects, like StarDog or Neo4j

https://github.com/orgs/stardog-union/

Looks like Knowledge Graph and semantic reasoner are the search terms du'jour, I haven't tracked these things since OpenCyc stopped being active.

Humans may not be able to effectively trudge through the creation of trillions of little rules and facts needed for an explicit and coherent expert world model, but LLMs definitely can be used for this.

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#8

Post by Rochus »

Interesting article, thanks.

> Perhaps their time will come again.

That's pretty sure, as soon as the hype about LLMs has calmed down. I hope that Cyc's data will then still be available, ideally open-source.

> https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/87/article/853382/pdf

Unfortunately paywalled; does anyone have a downloadable copy?

Post reply on HN