>>snewma+(OP)
While I respect Doug's intelligence, he showed a kind of perverse persistence in a failed idea, and I think it's telling that aspiring AI czar Gary Marcus admires the ruins of Cyc while neglecting to acknowledge that it represents a dead end in AI. Like science, the field of AI advances one funeral at a time. Doug pursued a pipe dream, and convinced others to do the same, despite the brittle and static nature of the AI he sought to build. Cyc was not a precursor to OpenAI, contrary to other comments in this thread. That would be like calling the zeppelin the precursor of the jet. It represents a different school of technology, and a much less effective one.