Home Lex Fridman Episode
Lex Fridman · 2021-09-15

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

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

The guest's own work

ProductBy the guest

Cyc

Cycorp (Doug Lenat)

“Psych is a project launched by you in 1984 and still is active today whose goal is to assemble a knowledge base that spans the basic concepts”— Lex Fridman
ProductBy the guest

OpenCyc

Cycorp (Doug Lenat)

“there are a lot of Robotics companies today for example which use open psych as their fundamental ontology”— Doug Lenat
ProductBy the guest

MathCraft

Cycorp (Doug Lenat)

“we developed a program called mathcraft to help sixth graders better understand math and it doesn't actually try to teach you the player anything”— Doug Lenat

Also referenced (named, not recommended)

MediaReferenced

Star Trek

Gene Roddenberry (inferred)

“I grew up watching Star Trek and anytime a computer was inconsistent it would either freeze up or explode or take over the world”— Doug Lenat
MediaReferenced

Road Runner

Warner Bros (inferred)

“something you know like um Road Runner cartoon context where physics is very different and in fact life and death are very different”— Doug Lenat
MediaReferenced

Romeo and Juliet

William Shakespeare

“if you've um read or seen Romeo and Juliet you know I could say to you something like uh remember when Juliet drank the potion”— Doug Lenat
BookReferencedISBN verified

The Time Machine

H.G. Wells

“it's very much like the Eloy and the warlocks in um HD Well's time machine so you have the Eloy who only program in the epistemological higher order logic language”— Doug Lenat
BookReferencedISBN verified

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman (inferred)

“thinking more deeply and slowly um um what Conan called thinking slowly versus thinking quickly whereas you want machine learning to think quickly”— Doug Lenat
ProductReferenced

OpenAI Codex

OpenAI

“they're now playing with a pretty cool thing called open a codex which is generating programs from documentation okay that's kind of useful”— Lex Fridman
ProductReferenced

IBM Watson

IBM

“if you look at IBM Watson and like certain impressive accomplishments for very specific test almost like a demo right”— Lex Fridman