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
Global funding would never have been capped at $200M for LMs because they were obviously useful from the get go and only got more useful with more investment.

Forget CYC, Forget LLMs. We abandoned Symbolic-AI for Neural Networks in NLP long before the advent of the science-fiction esque transformer LLMs. That's how terrible they were.

It wasn't for a lack of trying either. NNs were the underdogs. Some of the greatest minds desparately wanted the symbolic approach to be a valid one and tried for literally decades, and while I wouldn't call it a 'failure', it just couldn't handle anything fuzzy without a rigidly defined problem space, which is kind of unfortunate seeing as that is the exact kind of intelligence that actually exists in the real world.