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Douglas Lenat: Cyc and the Quest to Solve Common Sense Reasoning in AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #221

Lex Fridman3 HN recommenders · 2021–2023
139K views · podcast · evergreen · Uploaded 2021-09-15

Lex Fridman interviews Douglas Lenat, founder of Cyc, a decades-long project to encode common-sense knowledge and reasoning for AI. They discuss symbolic AI and how it may complement neural networks.

Pointed to as the long-form interview for understanding Lenat's work, especially after his death.

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5 comments from Hacker News

@CodeGlitch2021 · in “Deep Learning's Diminishing Returns”

I do wonder if we'll see the rise of symbolic AI to give deep learning a sense of common sense? I've been thinking a lot about this interview on Cyc: [VIDEO]

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@roeles2021 · in “Love seems like a high priority”

I thought that Douglas Lenat's remarks (at Lex Fridman's podcast) about this were really insightful[1]. [1] [VIDEO]

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@mindcrime2023 · in “Doug Lenat has died”

If anybody wants to hear more about Doug's work and ideas, here is a (fairly long) interview with Doug by Lex Fridman, from last year. [VIDEO]

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@HarHarVeryFunny2023 · in “Remembering Doug Lenat (1950–2023) and His Quest to Capture the World with Logic”

There's an interesting (& long!) recent Lex Fridman interview with Doug Lenat here: [VIDEO] Lenat thought CYC and neural nets could be complementary, with neural nets providing right brain/fast thinking capability, and CYC left brain/slow (analytic/reflective) thinking capability. It's odd to see Lenat discuss CYC the way he does - as if 40 years on everything was still going well despite it having dropped off the public radar twenty years ago.

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@HarHarVeryFunny2023 · in “Remembering Doug Lenat (1950–2023) and His Quest to Capture the World with Logic”

I'll admit it was news to me that Cycorp is still around! There's an interesting thread here that provides some insight from former/current employees into what they are actually doing nowadays. [LINK] There's also a lengthy Lex Fridman interview with Doug Lenat, from just a year ago, here: [VIDEO] It seems as if the "common sense expert system" foundation of CYC (the mostly unstated common knowledge behind all human communication) was basically completed, but what has failed to materialize is any higher level comprehensive knowledge base and reasoning system (i.e some form of AGI) based on top of this. It's not clear from the outside whether anyone working at Cycorp still really believes there is a CYC-based path to AGI, but regardless it seems not to be something that's really being funded and worked on, and 40 years on probably fair to say it's not going to happen. It seems that Cycorp stays alive by selling the hype and winning contracts to develop domain-specific expert systems, based on the CYC methodology and toolset, that really have little reliance on the "common sense" foundations they are nominally built on top of.

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