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
It would be very surprising if the results from this approach were superior to simply machine-translating the entries from another language—because e.g. English already has so much content and contributor activity, and LLMs are already very good at translating. I can’t imagine you’d get more than a fraction of people’s interest in authoring entries in this abstract language.

>>yowzad+RG
LLMs are good at translating between languages that have significant amounts of written content on the internet. There are few languages in this category that do not already have correspondingly large Wikipedias.

There are plenty of languages with millions of speakers that are only rarely used in writing, often because some other language is enforced in education. If you try to use an LLM to translate into such a language, you'll just get garbage.

It's very easy for a hand-crafted template to beat an LLM if the LLM can't do the job at all.