No, Cyc has not been forgotten; Eurisko has been!
Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project
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Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project
#32[dead]
Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project
#33Cyc 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.
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Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
From time to time, I read articles on the boundary between neural nets and knowledge graphs like a recent [1]. Sadly, no mention of Cyc.
I'd bet, judging mostly from my failed attempts at playing with OpenCyc around 2009, is that the Cyc has always been too closed and to complex to tinker with. That doesn't play nicely with academic work. When people finish their PhDs and start working for OpenAI, they simply don't have Cyc in their toolbox.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089360802...
Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project
#35I 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?
I tried to make something along these lines (https://truebase.treenotation.org/).
My approach, Cyc's, and others are fundamentally flawed for the same reason. There's a low level reason why deep nets work and symbolic engines are very bad.
Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project
#36from 2015-2019 i was working on a bot company (myra labs) where we were directly inspired by cyc to create knowledge graphs and integrate into LSTMs.
the frames, slots and values integrated were learned via a RNN for specific applications.
we even created a library for it called keyframe (modeling it after having the programmer specify the bot action states and have the model figure out the dialog in a structured way) - similar to how keyframes in animation work.
it would be interesting to resurrect that in the age of LLMs!
Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
From time to time, I read articles on the boundary between neural nets and knowledge graphs like a recent [1]. Sadly, no mention of Cyc. I'd bet, judging mostly from my failed attempts at playing with OpenCyc around 2009, is that the Cyc has always been too closed and to complex to tinker with. That doesn't play nicely with academic work. When people finish their PhDs and start working for OpenAI, they simply don't h…
oh i just commented elsewhere in the thread about our work in integrating frames and slots into LSTMs a few years ago! second this.
Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project
#38Cyc 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 think before 2022 it was still an open question whether it was a good approach.
Now it's clear that knowledge graphs are far inferior to deep neural nets, but even still few people can explain the _root_ reason why.
I don't think Lenat's bet was a waste. I think it was sensible based on the information at the time.
The decision to research it largely in secret, closed source, I think was a mistake.
Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project
#39deleted.
> 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…
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Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project
#40Cyc 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.
The comment above misses the point in at least four ways. (1) Being aware of history is not the same as endorsing it. (2) Knowledge graphs are useful for many applications. (3) How narrow of a mindset and how much hindsight bias must one have to claim that Lenat wasted decades of his life? (4) Don’t forget to think about this in context about what was happening in the field of AI.