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Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

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Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#71

Post by radomir_cernoch »

eru wrote: post #68
famouswaffles wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's just that most money today goes into curve fitting It's pretty interesting to see comments like this like deep nets weren't the underdog for decades. You think they were first choice ? The creator of cyc spent decades on it, and he's dead. We use modern NNs today because they just work that much better. Gofai was abandoned in NLP long before the likes of GPT because non deep-net alternatives just sucked that mu…

> If the problem space is without clear definitions and unambiguous axioms then non deep-net alternatives fall apart. I'm not sure deep-nets are the key here. I see the key as being lots of data and using statistical modeling. Instead of trying to fit what's happening into nice and clean black-and-white categories. Btw, I don't even think Gofai is all that good at domains with clear definitions and unambiguous axioms…

I very much agree about the A* idea, but this idea

> Tangent: that's very similar to philosophy.

doesn't click with me. Maybe, could your elaborate a bit, or provide an example, please?

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#74

Post by guenthert »

gumby wrote: post #11

This is a pretty good article. I was one of the first hires on the Cyc project when it started at MCC and was at first responsible for the decision to abandon the Interlisp-D implementation and replace it with one I wrote on Symbolics machines. Yes, back then one person could write the code base, which has long since grown and been ported off those machines. The KB is what matters anyway. I built it so different peop…

> which was unusual in those days, even though cloud computing was ubiquitous at PARC

I don't want to rob you of your literary freedom, but that threw me off. Mainframes were meant, yes?

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#75

Post by jonathankoren »

pfdietz wrote: post #23
mepian wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Allegro has an amazing UI and debugger. Like seriously, every alternative is janky experience that should be embarrassed to exist.

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#76

Post by astrange »

I have a vague memory in the 90s of a website that was trying to collect crowdsourced somewhat-structured facts about everything that would be used to build GOFAI.

Was trying to find it the other day and AI searches suggested Cyc; I feel like that's not it, but maybe it was? (It definitely wasn't Everything2.)

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#77

Post by guenthert »

pfdietz wrote: post #23
mepian wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Out of curiosity, which implementation(s) did you have in mind and why would it be desirable to migrate a large project there?

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#78

Post by thesz »

goatlover wrote: post #56
thesz wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lenat was able to produce superhuman performing AI in the early 1980s [1]. [1] https://voidfarer.livejournal.com/623.html You can label it "bad idea" but you can't bring LLMs back in time.

Why didn't it ever have the impact that LLMs are having now? Or that DeepMind has had? Cyc didn't pass the Turing Test or become superhuman chess and go players. Yet it's had much more time to become successful.

I guess it is funding. Compare funding of Google+Meta to what was/is available to Cyc.

Cyc was able to produce an impact, I keep pointing to MathCraft [1] which, at 2017, did not have a rival in the neural AI.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc#MathCraft

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#79

Post by Barrin92 »

goatlover wrote: post #56
thesz wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lenat was able to produce superhuman performing AI in the early 1980s [1]. [1] https://voidfarer.livejournal.com/623.html You can label it "bad idea" but you can't bring LLMs back in time.

Why didn't it ever have the impact that LLMs are having now? Or that DeepMind has had? Cyc didn't pass the Turing Test or become superhuman chess and go players. Yet it's had much more time to become successful.

Because the goal of Cyc was always to build a genuinely generally intelligent common sense reasoning system and that is a non-sexy long term research project. Being great at chess isn't a measure that's relevant for a project like this, Stockfish is superhuman at chess.

Re: Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project

#80

Post by thesz »

eru wrote: post #66
goatlover wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn't it ever have the impact that LLMs are having now? Or that DeepMind has had? Cyc didn't pass the Turing Test or become superhuman chess and go players. Yet it's had much more time to become successful.

I'm very skeptical of Cyc and other symbolic approaches. However I think they have a good excuse for 'Why didn't it ever have the impact that LLMs are having now?': lack of data and lack of compute. And it's the same excuse that neural networks themselves have: back in those days, we just didn't have enough data, and we didn't have enough compute, even if we had the data. (Of course, we learned in the meantime that n…

Usually, LLM's output gets passed through beam search [1] which is as symbolic as one can get.

[1] https://www.width.ai/post/what-is-beam-search

It is possible to even have 3-gram model to output better text predictions if you combine it with the beam search.

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