zlacker

>>snewma+(OP)
Cyc ("Syke") is one of those projects I've long found vaguely fascinating though I've never had the time / spoons to look into it significantly. It's an AI project based on a comprehensive ontology and knowledgebase.

Wikipedia's overview: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc>

Project / company homepage: <https://cyc.com/>

>>dredmo+83
I worked with Cyc. It was an impressive attempt to do the thing that it does, but it didn't work out. It was the last great attempt to do AI in the "neat" fashion, and its failure helped bring about the current, wildly successful "scruffy" approaches to AI.

It's failure is no shade against Doug. Somebody had to try it, and I'm glad it was one of the brightest guys around. I think he clung on to it long after it was clear that it wasn't going to work out, but breakthroughs do happen. (The current round of machine learning itself is a revival of a technique that had been abandoned, but people who stuck with it anyway discovered the tricks that made it go.)

>>jfenge+B7
Why not combine the two approaches? A bicameral mind, of sorts?

>>rvbiss+9m
I'm sure somebody somewhere is working on it. I've already seen articles teaching LLMs offload math problems onto a separate module, rather than trying to solve them via the murk of neural network.

I suppose you'd architect it as a layer. It wants to say something, and the ontology layer says, "No, that's stupid, say something else". The ontology layer can recognize ontology-like statements and use them to build and evolve the ontology.

It would be even more interesting built into the visual/image models.

I have no idea if that's any kind of real progress, or if it's merely filtering out the dumb stuff. A good service, to be sure, but still not "AGI", whatever the hell that turns out to be.

Unless it turns out to be the missing element that puts it over the top. If I had any idea I wouldn't have been working with Cyc in the first place.