101–110 of 176 posts
My 2 cents is that I can ask just about any question I can think of and absorb and internalize an amazing answer in 5 minutes of reading. Many of those same questions can be automatically asked and answered too. The web and search engines are realizing the promise far better than anything else.
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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.
> Common Lisp that compiles to Java To Java bytecode or to Java code ?
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Maybe because the world and human knowledge are incredibly complex and difficult things to put into logical relations well enough to achieve more success? Consider that humans learn though having bodies to explore the world with, while forming a variety of social relations to learn the culture. Which is very different from encoding a bunch of rules to make up an intelligence.
Creating a software that learns the real world indeed seems like a really hard problem without a body. I was referring to why a software that parse the semantics of Wikipedia articles and make them queryable through natural language questions, is something that humanity isn't able to do?
I think people like Rodney Brooks are of the belief you need to start with robots that learn their environment and build up from there.
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1) Do you think it's possible that Cyc would lead to AGI? 2) Do you think it's possible that Cyc would lead to AI advances that are impressive to the layman like AlphaGo or GPT-2?
These answers are very personal to me. I joined Cycorp because Doug Lenat sold me on it being a more viable path toward something like AGI than I had suspected when I read about it. I left for a number of reasons (e.g. just to pursue other projects) but a big one was slowly coming to doubt that. I could be sold on the idea that Cyc or something Cyc-like could be a piece of the puzzle for AGI. I say "Cyc-like" because…
1. Manually add more and more common-sense knowledge and extend the inference engine
2. ???
3. AGI!
That's the same impression I had in the early days of expert systems. I once made the comment, "It's not going to work, but it's worth trying to find out why it won't work." I was thinking that rule-based inference was a dead end, but maybe somebody could reuse the knowledge base with something that works better.
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> Common Lisp that compiles to Java To Java bytecode or to Java code ?
Java _code_. It's madness, though I'm assured it made sense at the time.
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Are there any real world applications that are built on Cyc's knowledge base and actually in regular use? Is Cyc critical to those applications or could they have been more easily built some other way?
Yes, I probably can't talk about them though. There are companies that use Cyc as part of processes for avoiding certain kinds of risks and the financial impact (by the company's estimation, not Cycorp's) is an unfathomably large amount of money. The thing I'm thinking of seems like something Cyc (or something Cyc-like) is relatively uniquely suited for. But for large scale systems, which thing is more easy in the lo…
Lol. It really sounds like none of the projects need Cyc. Sounds like the model is to bait smart engineers to work at an engineery company and then sell engineering consulting to companies who would never be able to land their own smart engineers.
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> Common Lisp that compiles to Java To Java bytecode or to Java code ?
Java _code_. It's madness, though I'm assured it made sense at the time.
That's a benefit of having a VM with JIT.
Which is laughably small in retrospect. I wonder what current estimates are.
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Yes, I probably can't talk about them though. There are companies that use Cyc as part of processes for avoiding certain kinds of risks and the financial impact (by the company's estimation, not Cycorp's) is an unfathomably large amount of money. The thing I'm thinking of seems like something Cyc (or something Cyc-like) is relatively uniquely suited for. But for large scale systems, which thing is more easy in the lo…
> With a lot of Cycorp projects, it's hard to point your finger at exactly where the "AI" is happening. Lol. It really sounds like none of the projects need Cyc. Sounds like the model is to bait smart engineers to work at an engineery company and then sell engineering consulting to companies who would never be able to land their own smart engineers.
in my experience, most people dismiss cyc as a failed science experiment. this shouldnt be! after all, many important deep learning concepts have their roots in the 80s, and it is possible that cyc could be revived too.
Just like the Encyclopedia Brittanica has found its match in WikiPedia so CYC will find its match in something open. The engine - if the comments here are to be believed as still currently relevant - is a core that may be relevant and a huge number of domain specific hacks. Let's hope sooner or later CYC management comes to their senses and revives OpenCYC.