I would sooner hold my breath waiting for OpenAI to open up than Cycorp :)
> It took even more than forty years and costed at least as much before neural networks became really useful
The correct class of comparison to make with "neural networks" would be "symbolic AI" writ large. Symbolic AIs have been working quite well in some areas. Just not at all in terms of common sense reasoning, or anything approaching AGI.
If you want to keep "Cyc" in the comparison, then I would argue there is no comparison possible. Without exaggeration, there has never been a single project in AI as expensive as Cyc before 2020. Only with GPT-2 did the cost start to exceed the million USD mark. (Without exact figures, AlphaGo and Deep Blue probably also cost millions of dollars, but they unambiguously worked.)
It's also just not true that it took 40 years. Consider e.g. LeNet-5, which was up and running in 1998, and was used in ATMs to read real cheques. The main cost was 10 years of engineering stamina by LeCun's research group at Bell Labs. The finished version could be trained "for about 20 epoches over MNIST. It took 2 to 3 days of CPU time on a Silicon Graphics Origin 2000 server, using a single 200 MHz R10000 processor."
(1998 might technically be 40 years out from e.g. the inception of the perceptron in the 1950s, but if that is supposed to be our reference point for neural networks, then Cyc's reference point should be the inception of logical AIs in the same decade. And really, what use was Cyc in industry in 1998?)