This was an EXTREMELY interesting paper on what modern LLMs can learn from older older symbolic AI / expert system approaches to improve the validity of what those statistical models generate on their own, using the Cyc system as the contrast to the modern systems.
He started the Cyc project, using Lisp Machines as a development environment. The project is roughly since 40 years ongoing. Cyc was the dream of a large-scale knowledge base of common sense knowledge. One that has many ways of reasoning and making inferences. It used SubL a variant of Common Lisp.
Dog Lenat, founder of #Cyc, passed away earlier this week. From Professor Ken Forbus:
"People in AI often don't give the Cyc project the respect it deserves. Whether or not you agree with an approach, understanding what has happened in different lines of work is important. The Cyc project was the first demonstration that symbolic representations and reasoning could scale to capture significant portions of commonsense…”