My gut feeling says there is something in this approach that's needed to make GenAI work reliably. The brain has an associative feature, sure; but it's not very useful without filters sorting signal from nonsense, making sense of the content.
Have they been able to get Cyc to generate its own content in meaningful ways? I would expect such a system to eventually be able to derive a lot of details by itself, needing less and less spoon feeding.