I don't work there anymore, though I know some folks that do. I suspect that they're reading this and don't want me to air out their dirty laundry too much.
Here's what I'll say: the degree of isolation between different mindsets and disagreement (that was typically very amicable if it was acknowledged at all) is emblematic of the culture of the company. There are people there with raaadically different ideas of what Cyc is for, what it's good at and even about empirical things like how it actually works. They mostly get along, sometimes there's tension. Over the years, the Cyc as its actually implemented has drifted pretty far from the Cyc that people like Doug Lenat believe in, and the degree to which they're willing or able to acknowledge that seems to sort of drift around, often dependent on factors like mood. Doug would show up and be very confused about why some things were hard because he just believes that Cyc works differently than it does in practice, and people had project deadlines, so they often implemented features via hacks to shape inference or hand-built algorithms to deliver answers that Doug thought ought to be derived from principles via inference. Doug thinks way more stuff that Cyc does is something that it effectively learned to do by automatically deriving a way to solve the general form of a problem, rather than a programmer up late hand-coding things to make a demo work the next day, and the programmers aren't going to tell him because there's a demo tomorrow too and it's not working yet.
> the degree of isolation between different mindsets and disagreement (that was typically very amicable if it was acknowledged at all) is emblematic of the culture of the company
A thoughtful perspective that is useful for my own understanding.
Here's what I'll say: the degree of isolation between different mindsets and disagreement (that was typically very amicable if it was acknowledged at all) is emblematic of the culture of the company. There are people there with raaadically different ideas of what Cyc is for, what it's good at and even about empirical things like how it actually works. They mostly get along, sometimes there's tension. Over the years, the Cyc as its actually implemented has drifted pretty far from the Cyc that people like Doug Lenat believe in, and the degree to which they're willing or able to acknowledge that seems to sort of drift around, often dependent on factors like mood. Doug would show up and be very confused about why some things were hard because he just believes that Cyc works differently than it does in practice, and people had project deadlines, so they often implemented features via hacks to shape inference or hand-built algorithms to deliver answers that Doug thought ought to be derived from principles via inference. Doug thinks way more stuff that Cyc does is something that it effectively learned to do by automatically deriving a way to solve the general form of a problem, rather than a programmer up late hand-coding things to make a demo work the next day, and the programmers aren't going to tell him because there's a demo tomorrow too and it's not working yet.