zlacker

>>snewma+(OP)
I interviewed with Doug Lenat was I was a 17 year old high school student, and he hired me as a summer intern for Cycorp - my first actual programming job.

That internship was life-changing for me, and I'll always be grateful to him for taking a wild bet on a literally a kid.

Doug was a brilliant computer scientist, and a pioneer of artificial intelligence. Though I was very junior at Cycorp, it was a small company so I sat in many meetings with him. It was obvious that he understood every detail of how the technology worked, and was extremely smart.

Cycorp was 30 years ahead of its time and never actually worked. For those who don't know, it was essentially the first OpenAI - the first large-scale commercial effort to create general artificial intelligence.

I learned a lot from Doug about how to be incredibly ambitious, and how to not give up. Doug worked on Cycorp for multiple decades. It never really took off, but he managed to keep funding it and keep hiring great people so he could keep plugging away at the problem. I know very few people who have stuck with an idea for so long.

>>snowma+Cm
That sounds awesome! Was coming back to Cycorp to permanently work ever in the works for you? Or did you think the intern was nice but you didn't want a career in the field?

Also - what exactly did you do in the internship as a 17 year old - what skills did you have?

>>xNeil+ZC
I was certainly interested in working at Cycorp full-time. But after two summers there, I could tell that the technical approach they were taking was just not working.

My first summer, I was an ontologist, which was a unique role that only existed at Cycorp where they hired people to literally hand-enter facts like "A cat has four legs" into Cyc using formal logic. My second summer I programmed (poorly) in Lisp for them.

>>snowma+CO
> I could tell that the technical approach they were taking was just not working.

Could you say more about that? How could you tell?