Hacker News Reader

Comment by brundolf | Hacker News Reader

> and agree Lenat was a grifter

I worked at Cycorp for 3.5 years, so I can say:

While I haven't been surprised to see Cyc become more and more clearly a failure, Doug Lenat was no grifter. To the very end, he (alongside a handful of others at the company) was the truest true-believer I've ever known. Cyc was his life's mission, and he never doubted that.

View on HN

What do you think made Lenat work so secretively? I suspect his ideas could have advanced a lot quicker if he'd been plugged into the community, sharing and getting feedback. In research it's almost never a good move to pursue a dream in isolation.

I'd say that being a believer doesn't necessarily conflict with being a grifter. In fact the true believer is practically obligated to engage in tricks, because the ends justify the means. For example taking government contracts for anti terrorism because the problem isn't well defined, your results are hard to check, and the money is going to be good if temporary. Anything where you don't really expect to provide promised value is always worth it because you're going to "pay it back" with big results later. For more recent stuff along the same lines, colonizing mars and getting away from oil are like that too, because for the true believer stuff like this is worth a little stock manipulation or whatever else is required.

Terminology aside, you're making a lot of accusations/character portraits that I don't think you have any basis for.

Doug was an uncynical person.

Doug Lenat was a gem, and I am sad he is no longer with us. He had a lot of interesting ideas for building a large symbolic AI system.

Just because Cyc - and symbolic AI in general - failed to scale like DNNs (including LLMs) doesn't mean that its ideas were all bad.

Grifting suggests a level of cynicism, that one knows that one is selling snake oil.

I don’t know Lenat and don’t have an opinion one way or another. But be careful suggesting someone is grifting verses just believing in an idea that ultimately doesn’t come to fruition.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com