zlacker

>>todsac+(OP)
A very interesting and worthwhile article (better than the comments here would suggest). However, I find it a bit of a pity that the author places so much emphasis on the assumption that the project has failed. The approach has not simply failed because the search for a solution has been going on for forty years. It took even more than forty years and costed at least as much before neural networks became really useful, and nobody would claim that the project failed because of that. And today's LLM are not really that intelligent yet. Maybe Cycorp's knowledge base will be made generally accessible at some point, so that it can be used to train LLMs. Perhaps then a greater benefit of this data will become apparent.

>>Rochus+zu
> Maybe Cycorp's knowledge base will be made generally accessible at some point, so that it can be used to train LLMs.

More likely, it will be made increasingly irrelevant as open alternatives to it are developed instead. The Wikipedia folks are working on some sort of openly developed interlingua that can be edited by humans, in order to populate Wikipedias in underrepresented languages with basic encyclopedic text. (Details very much TBD, but see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia ) This will probably be roughly as powerful as the system OP posits at some point in the article, that can generate text in both English and Japanese but only if fed with the right "common sense" to begin with. It's not clear exactly how useful logical inference on such statements might turn out to be, but the potential will definitely exist for something like that too, if it's found to be genuinely worthwhile in some way.

>>zozbot+yv
> made increasingly irrelevant as open alternatives to it are developed instead

Certainly interesting what these projects are going for, but it's unlikely an "open alternative", given that the degree of formalization and rigor achieved by Cyc's higher-order logic specification is likely not achievable by statistical learning, and a symbolic approach is barely achievable in a shorter time than Cyc.