zlacker

>>todsac+(OP)
> Cyc grew to contain approximately 30 million assertions at a cost of $200 million and 2,000 person-years. Yet despite Lenat’s repeated predictions of imminent breakthrough, it never came.

That seems like pretty small potatoes compared to how much has been spent on LLMs these days.

Or to put it another way: if global funding for LLM development had been capped at $200m, how many of them would even exist?

>>mcphag+Cd
Language models repeatedly delivered practical, real-world economic value at every step of the way from at least n-grams on. (Remember the original 'unreasonable effectiveness of data'?) The applications were humble and weren't like "write all my code for me and then immanentize the eschaton", but they were real things like spelling error detection & correction, text compressors, voice transcription boosters, embeddings for information retrieval, recommenders, knowledge graph creation (ironically enough), machine translation services, etc. In contrast, Yuxi goes through the handful of described Cyc use-cases from their entire history, and it's not impressive.