zlacker

>>todsac+(OP)
I enjoyed this read and agree Lenat was a grifter, which is easy to see based on contracts and closed source. But I dislike how the article seems tilted towards a hit piece against search, heuristics, reasoning, symbolic approaches in AI, and even striving for explainable/understandable systems. It's a subtext throughout, so perhaps I'm misinterpreting it.. but the neats vs the scruffies thing is just not really productive, and there seems to be no real reason for the "either/or" mentality.

To put some of this into starker contrast.. 40 years, 200 million dollars, and broken promises is the cost burned on something besides ML? Wait isn't the current approach burning that kind of cash in a weekend, and aren't we proudly backdating deep-learning to ~1960 every time someone calls it "new"? Is a huge volume of inscrutable weights, with unknown sources, generated at huge costs, really "better" than closed-source in terms of transparency? Are we not very busy building agents and critics very much like Minky's society of mind while we shake our heads and say he was wrong?

This write-up also appears to me as if it were kind of punching down. A "hostile assessment" in an "obituary" is certainly easy in hindsight, especially if business is booming in your (currently very popular) neighborhood. If you didn't want to punch down, if you really want to go on record as saying logic/search are completely dead-ended and AGI won't ever touch the stuff.. it would probably look more like critiquing symbolica.ai, saying that nothing like scallop-lang / pyreason will ever find any use-cases, etc.

>>photon+hl
Why call Lenat a "grifter"? How's that about punching down, not to say, pissing on dead peoples' graves?

Very disappointing as otherwise your comment is insightful and on point.

>>YeGobl+lo1
I like the guys general ideas about research but um. Did you see the section describing contracts? Article states 50% of funding came from the military. People would be freaking out if they heard the same about Google, Facebook, or OpenAI.. for good reason.

I'm not a fan of weaponizing AI, and I think that's what we're talking about. Either it was a glorified CMS, in which case the presentation as AI was dishonest and cynical. Or it really was AI, in which case it was weaponized research.

If we're talking about graves, then it might be good to also consider all of the ones that you're not mentioning, the ones presumably resulting from the details about where the money came from. How many? How many of those deserved it and how many were bad inferences? I guess we'll never know.

>>photon+iB5
Oh, OK. Well I don't call that a grifter, just an ordinary, garden variety, techie. Many (not all) do that; actively seek funding from militaries for their work.

E.g., just this week MS fired two people for protesting the use of Azure to power the Palestinian Genocide [1].

When people talk about the military-industrial complex, what they really should be talking about is the military-FAANG complex. AI and military intelligence are both the same sad joke.

Lenat was no different in that, so I don't think it's fair to call him a grifter. I do think it's fair to call him out on being an asshole who put money above peoples' lives.

Btw, I've released some of my free stuff under a modified GNU 3.0 with an added clause that prohibits its use for military applications. I've been told that makes it "non-free" and it seems that's a bad thing. Lenat is only one nerd in a long line of nerds that need to think very hard about the ethics of their work.

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[1] https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-protest-employees-fired...

They were protesting about this:

https://www.972mag.com/microsoft-azure-openai-israeli-army-c...