Re:Obituary for Cyc
by josephg on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @06:37PM
(#43627151)
That argument would hold a lot more weight if Cyc could fly. But as this article points out, decades of work and millions of dollars have utterly failed to get it off the ground.
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right, but as others have pointed out the amount of money invested in Cyc is approx 2 orders of magnitude less than what was invested in LLMs. So maybe the method was OK, but it was insufficiently resourced.
Maybe, but I doubt it. Transformer models got all that investment because small transformers work and large transformers work better than small transformer models. We can extend the line and predict what happens when the model is scaled.
Small Cyc doesn't do anything useful. Large Cyc doesn't do anything useful. Why should we make huge Cyc? If we extend the line out, all evidence predicts that it'll still be useless.