RE: [JOIN] Stephen Reed

From: ben goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Mon May 20 2002 - 11:41:43 MDT


***
Dwight Lodge is no longer with Cycorp. The VC opportunities and IPO market
are still bad for us. But the government funding is steady and Darpa has
an appreciation now for ontologies and our role as a common domain
vocabulary.
***

I'm glad the company is surviving!

***
> If this is your reaction, then what I would like to see is a paper or
book
> addressing the "grand Cyc vision" -- i.e. what do you (or Lenat etc.)
> envision Cyc (the database and the AI system) looking like in, say, 5-20
> years, when you have overcome limitations like the ones I've cited above
> and made a more fully fleshed out AI system? Are there internal Cycorp
> documents addressing this sort of thing?

I wish! Our system is so large, and our projects so pressing, that our day
to day focus is almost entirely incremental - just getting Cyc's
vocabulary more functional, and Cyc's deductive reasoning more
supportive. Doug has a vision of what will happen, but it is more
opportunistic, postponing the details until Cyc knows enough to learn from
reading (for example). Doug's view on Cyc's progress in five years are
published for the public in many popular articles which you can get from
Google.
***

This approach worries me.

I am not sure that this kind of "hill climbing" approach to AGI can work
(incremental improvement of Cyc being essentially the hill-climbing
algorithm applied in "AI design" space ;)

You may well incrementally improve yourselves into a local optimum in AI
design space, I think...

-- Ben



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