{"id":185704,"date":"2025-04-15T07:41:06","date_gmt":"2025-04-15T07:41:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/apple-2\/michael-tsai-blog-obituary-for-cyc\/"},"modified":"2025-04-15T07:41:06","modified_gmt":"2025-04-15T07:41:06","slug":"michael-tsai-blog-obituary-for-cyc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=185704","title":{"rendered":"Michael Tsai &#8211; Blog &#8211; Obituary for Cyc"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/yuxi-liu-wired.github.io\/essays\/posts\/cyc\/\">Yuxi Liu<\/a> (via <a href=\"https:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=43625474\">Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/yuxi-liu-wired.github.io\/essays\/posts\/cyc\/\">\n<p>The legendary Cyc project, Douglas Lenat\u2019s 40-year quest to build artificial general intelligence by scaling symbolic logic, has failed. Based on extensive archival research, this essay brings to light its secret history so that it may be widely known.<\/p>\n<p>[\u2026]<\/p>\n<p>In 1984, he launched Cyc to manually encode millions of facts and rules about common sense, predicting that once this \u201cknowledge pump\u201d was primed, the system would begin true machine learning by reading natural language texts and conducting autonomous scientific experiments. Cyc grew to contain approximately 30 million assertions at a cost of $200 million and 2,000 person-years. Yet despite Lenat\u2019s repeated predictions of imminent breakthrough, it never came.<\/p>\n<p>[\u2026]<\/p>\n<p>Cycorp achieved long-term financial stability that is uncommon for a small technology company, but all known commercial uses of its system involve standard methods in expert systems, data integration, and information retrieval, functionally the same as similar services offered by established corporations like Oracle and IBM. No evidence suggests that Cyc\u2019s purported higher intelligence provided any competitive advantage.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Previously:<\/p>\n<p class=\"tags\"><a rel=\"tag\" href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/tag\/artificial-intelligence\/\">Artificial Intelligence<\/a> <a rel=\"tag\" href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/tag\/history\/\">History<\/a> <a rel=\"tag\" href=\"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/tag\/sunset\/\">Sunset<\/a><\/p>\n<h2><a id=\"respond\"><\/a><br \/>\n2 Comments<br \/>\n <\/h2>\n<hr class=\"com-hr\" \/>\n<hr class=\"com-hr\" \/>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yuxi Liu (via Hacker News): The legendary Cyc project, Douglas Lenat\u2019s 40-year quest to build artificial general intelligence by scaling symbolic logic, has failed. Based on extensive archival research, this essay brings to light its secret history so that it may be widely known. [\u2026] In 1984, he launched Cyc to manually encode millions of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11768],"tags":[3767,73034,1823,15904,17088],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-185704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apple-2","tag-blog","tag-cyc","tag-michael","tag-obituary","tag-tsai"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Michael Tsai - Blog - Obituary for Cyc - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=185704\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Michael Tsai - Blog - Obituary for Cyc - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Yuxi Liu (via Hacker News): The legendary Cyc project, Douglas Lenat\u2019s 40-year quest to build artificial general intelligence by scaling symbolic logic, has failed. Based on extensive archival research, this essay brings to light its secret history so that it may be widely known. 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