Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

Post by xpe » Thu, Apr 18, 2024, 12:05 AM UTC

breck wrote: post #38

blueyes wrote: post #22

Cyc 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.

Post by xpe » Thu, Apr 18, 2024, 12:09 AM UTC

breck wrote: post #38

blueyes wrote: post #22

Cyc 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.

Post by Rochus » Thu, Apr 18, 2024, 12:23 AM UTC

dmd wrote: post #44

Rochus wrote: post #8

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?

https://jumpshare.com/s/X5arOz0ld3AzBGQ47hWf

Post by thesz » Thu, Apr 18, 2024, 12:28 AM UTC

tkgally wrote: post #29

zopf wrote: post #28

Earlier 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?

Post by ultra_nick » Thu, Apr 18, 2024, 1:05 AM UTC