zlacker

I don't have strong opinions about Cyc in either direction, but this obit feels pretty mean-spirited to me: it imputes moral failure on Lenat and others for working on symbolic AI for 40 years, without acknowledging that Lenat's basic belief ("priming the pump") is shared by ML too -- the main difference is that ML needed the pump to be primed with an overwhelming amount of compute, which grew faster than Cyc's ability to ingest facts and relations.

(This isn't to imply that I think symbolic AI "works"; only that more perspective on underlying beliefs is due.)

>>woodru+(OP)
I don't think this is correct. The capability for drawing useful logical inferences from something like a Cyc knowledge base is far more compute limited than just doing ML on any given amount of data. We're talking exponential (or worse!) vs. pure linear scaling. This is the real-world, practical reason why the Cyc folks eventually found no value at all in their most general inference engine, and ended up exclusively relying on their custom-authored, more constrained inference generators instead.

>>zozbot+T
Again, I'm not saying Cyc's approach is correct. I'm saying that the underlying hope that made Lenat plow through the AI winter is the same one that made ML researchers plow through it. It's just that the ML researchers reached the end of the tunnel first (for some senses of first).

>>woodru+(OP)
I don't think there's anything wrong with exploring a field for decades. There are many scientists who have a mix of successes and failures. But this guy spend his whole life and many years of other people's lives trying one single thing that never really worked. You could call that being a single-minded visionary, but I don't think it's unreasonable for others to think it either kooky or a giant waste.

A useful comparison to me here is all the alchemical efforts to turn lead into gold. Can modern physicists do that? Not economically, but sure. [1] If alchemists had just persisted, would they have gotten there too? No, it was a giant waste, and pretty loony to a modern eye. And I'd say both alchemists and a number of AI proponents both are so wrapped up in pursuing specific outcomes (gold, AGI) that they indulge in a lot of magical thinking.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...

>>woodru+(OP)
Symbolic AI works. So much that it's "not AI" anymore.