I worked on Cyc as a visiting student for a couple of summers; built some visualization tools to help people navigate around the complex graph. But I never was quite sold on the project, some tangential learnings here: https://hyperphor.com/ammdi/alpha-ontologist
Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project
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Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project
#22Cyc is one of those bad ideas that won't die, and which keeps getting rediscovered on HN. Lenat wasted decades of his life on it. Knowledge graphs like Cyc are labor intensive to build and difficult to maintain. They are brittle in the face of change, and useless if they cannot represent the underlying changes of reality.
Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is Cyc still implemented in Lisp?
Yes: https://cyc.com/archives/glossary/subl/ Also see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMMiaCtOzV0
Interesting that they're still using Allegro Common Lisp. I would be interested in knowing what technical issues (if any) prevented them from migrating to other implementations.
Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project
#24deleted.
Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Graph databases win in flexibility and ease of writing the queries over graphs, honestly. Of course the underlying storage can be (and often is) a bunch of specially prepared relational tables. But the strength in graph databases comes from restating the problem in different way, with query languages targeting the specific problem space. Similarly there are tasks where SQL will be plainly better.
Every time I try to write a query for GitHub’s graphql API I lose a few hours and go back to rest. May be it’s easy if all the edges and inputs are actually implemented in ways you would expect.
GraphQL isn't exactly a proper graph database query language. The name IIRC comes from Facebook Graph API, and the language isn't actually designed as graph database interface.
Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project
#26deleted.
> If Susan goes shopping does her go with her?
Is there a typo in that question? Because this does not parse as a sentence in any way for me, and if that's part of the point, I don't understand how. How would a toddler answer this question (except for looking confused like an adult, or maybe making up some nonsense to go with it)?
Happy to be told how I missed the obvious!
(EDIT: By the way, I don't know why you got downvoted, I certainly didn't.)
Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project
#27Back in the mid 1990s Cyc was giving away their Symbolics machines and I waffled on spending the $1500 in shipping to get them to me in Denver. In retrospect I should have, of course!
Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project
#28Cyc is one of those bad ideas that won't die, and which keeps getting rediscovered on HN. Lenat wasted decades of his life on it. Knowledge graphs like Cyc are labor intensive to build and difficult to maintain. They are brittle in the face of change, and useless if they cannot represent the underlying changes of reality.
I wonder to what degree an LLM could now produce frames/slots/values in the knowledge graph. With so much structure already existing in the Cyc knowledge graph, could those frames act as the crystal seed upon which an LLM could crystallize its latent knowledge about the world from the trillions of tokens it was trained upon?
Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project
#29Cyc is one of those bad ideas that won't die, and which keeps getting rediscovered on HN. Lenat wasted decades of his life on it. Knowledge graphs like Cyc are labor intensive to build and difficult to maintain. They are brittle in the face of change, and useless if they cannot represent the underlying changes of reality.
I wonder to what degree an LLM could now produce frames/slots/values in the knowledge graph. With so much structure already existing in the Cyc knowledge graph, could those frames act as the crystal seed upon which an LLM could crystallize its latent knowledge about the world from the trillions of tokens it was trained upon?
I had the same thought. Does anybody know if there have been attempts either to incorporate Cyc-like graphs into LLM training data or to extend such graphs with LLMs?
Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project
#30I 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?
At a much lower level, I've been having fun hacking away at my Concludia side project over time. It's purely proposition level and will eventually support people being able to create their own arguments and contest others. http://concludia.org/