Thus far, the payoff has not been compelling. Relatively little has been published about 
CYC (making evaluation challenging, though see this interesting Hacker News thread), 
and the commercial applications seem modest, rather than overwhelming. Most people, 
if they know CYC at all, regard it as a failure, and few current researchers make 
extensive use of it. Even fewer seem inclined to try to build competing systems of 
comparable breadth. (Large-scale databases like Google Knowledge Graph, Freebase 
and YAGO focus primarily on facts rather than commonsense.) 

Given how much effort CYC required, and how little impact it has had on the field as a 
whole, it's hard not to be excited by Transformers like GPT-2. When they work well, 
they seem almost magical, as if they automatically and almost effortlessly absorbed 
large swaths of common-sense knowledge of the world. For good measure, 

 

 

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THE NEXT DECADE IN AI / GARY MARCUS
The Next Decade in AI-