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Cyc

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Re: Cyc

#51

Post by xamuel »

lidHanteyk wrote: post #2

I think that this particular topic is evergreen because people are perennially surprised that this technology, which seems so reasonable and advanced at first blush, has failed to be useful in practice.

I spent a year doing an ontology postdoc. I can't speak for Cyc, but from what I saw of the ontology world, there are a lot of charlatans and people who are using it as a buzzword to make grant proposals sexier. Whether or not there's real potential in the technology, that kind of environment surely isn't conducive to achieving said potential. An outsider trying to peek into the field is immediately swamped by vast oceans of garbage, and everyone in the field is an expert at marketing themselves so if there are legitimate researcher gems in the field, I don't know how you'd actually find them from amidst all the noise.

Re: Cyc

#52

Post by hitekker »

catpolice wrote: post #15

I worked for Cycorp for a few years recently. AMA, I guess? I obviously won't give away any secrets (e.g. business partners, finer grained details of how the inference engine works), but I can talk about the company culture, some high level technical things and the interpretation of the project that different people at the company have that makes it seem more viable than you might guess from the outside. There were s…

Your analysis of Cyc is insightful and resonates with my own experiences.

Two general questions, if you don't mind:

1. How would you characterize the relationship between the politics and structure in your company?

2. Do feel that the layer of people actively isolating the top embodied the company's culture?

Re: Cyc

#53

Post by Jeff_Brown »

brundolf wrote: post #21
jes5199 wrote: post #13

last time I looked at OpenCyc's knowledge base, the information encoded was all strangely specific academic stuff - like very fine classifications and relationships between species of tapeworms and of fungus. There was very little daily-life common-sense knowledge, even though that's often the hook in interviews and articles about Cyc's purpose. I'm not sure why that's true - maybe it's hard to decide what the 'facts…

Employee of Cycorp here. A few thoughts: - At least right now, we have a good amount of common-sense information about the world (I don't know when "last time" was for you). - That said, we have a lot of highly specialized knowledge in various domains, so if you took a random sample of the knowledge base (KB) it may not be as common-sense-centric as you'd hope. But the KB is also incredibly large, so that doesn't mea…

What's an example of something that feels just out of reach? What's the simplest thing that feels impossibly far away?

Re: Cyc

#54

Post by mblackstone »

Is it possible For a non-academic to get a ResearchCyc license? I’ve used OpenCyc in the past; now that I’m retired I’d like to look deeper into Cyc.

Re: Cyc

#55

Post by m0zg »

catpolice wrote: post #15

I worked for Cycorp for a few years recently. AMA, I guess? I obviously won't give away any secrets (e.g. business partners, finer grained details of how the inference engine works), but I can talk about the company culture, some high level technical things and the interpretation of the project that different people at the company have that makes it seem more viable than you might guess from the outside. There were s…

How do you deal with the fact that human knowledge is probabilistic? I.e. that it's actually mostly "belief" rather than a "fact", and the "correct" answer heavily depends on the context in a somewhat Bayesian way. Best I can tell we don't yet have math to model this in any kind of a comprehensive way.

Re: Cyc

#56

Post by TheDonut »

catpolice wrote: post #15

I worked for Cycorp for a few years recently. AMA, I guess? I obviously won't give away any secrets (e.g. business partners, finer grained details of how the inference engine works), but I can talk about the company culture, some high level technical things and the interpretation of the project that different people at the company have that makes it seem more viable than you might guess from the outside. There were s…

What can Cyc do that other tech can't do? And, more importantly, is that stuff useful?

Re: Cyc

#57

Post by Jeff_Brown »

randomidiot666 wrote: post #45
radeklew wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't it be? It seems to me that at worst we would have to wait for computers to become as powerful and complex as a human brain, and then simulating human intelligence would be a matter of accurately modelling the connections. Is there doubt as to whether a neuron can be represented computationally?

Yes there is doubt. Can you say for sure that we have a complete model of all physics, and that all physics can be represented computationally? We're still discovering new features of neurons at the quantum level. Who knows how far down it goes. There may be some unknown physics at play inside neurons that can not be computed by a Turing machine. https://www.elsevier.com/about/press-releases/research-and-j...

There are aspects of quantum that we don't understand, but we have no reason to believe intelligence relies on them, any more than bridges do.

Re: Cyc

#58

Post by Jeff_Brown »

randomidiot666 wrote: post #50
yters wrote: post #36

Why is there never any fundamental research whether human intelligence is even computable? All these huge, expensive projects based on an untested premise.

But there is. We have fundamental research into whether physics is computable. We also have fundamental research on the physical structure of human consciousness/intelligence. So first we need to discover the physical model of human intelligence, and then we can determine its computability.

Intelligence is a human property, yes, but also a Platonic one. We didn't need to understand how humans process math in order to get computers to do it.

Re: Cyc

#59

Post by jkaptur »

_bxg1 wrote: post #35
jkaptur wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So to "change a lightbulb", so to speak, the system decides something like "turn off the lamp first". But then the evaluation above says that the human would not dislike touching the bulb, but, in reality, it's still too hot. So you could incorporate some kind of cooling rate, then change the above to "When an incandescent bulb has been on x of the last y minutes it is too hot to touch". This all seems just impossibl…

It is very complicated, yes. The goal is to be AI's "left brain"; the slower, more methodical (and explainable!) end of the spectrum. We see our place as being complementary to ML's "right brain", fast-but-messy thinking. I will say also that our focus on "common sense" means we make deliberate choices about where to "bottom out" the granularity with which we represent the world; otherwise we'd find ourselves reasoni…

Thanks so much for the explanation!

Re: Cyc

#60

Post by yters »

aidenn0 wrote: post #42
yters wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it making real money, or speculative money on the moon shot premise that AGI will rule it all if successful? I worked at an AI company before, and it was the latter.

My understanding is mostly the latter, but definitely also the former, but it's based off of "I worked there, but our customer list isn't public so I can't tell you who" type statements like you'll see elsewhere. If I had to guess what it's been actually used for, I'd wager it's money laundering or counter-terrorism type stuff; it's fairly well suited to finding connections between people and entities given a large d…

Yes that was the sort of usecase for the AI company I worked at, similar data mining competing with Palantir.
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