What kind of experiments have you guys done that combine symbolic and statistical/ML methods? It sounds like an area ripe for research
https://v1.probmods.org/learning-as-conditional-inference.ht...
> I (and my company) believe in a hybrid approach
> I don't know of any higher-level hybridization experiments
That contradiction and the admission that Cyc only has "one ML person on staff" signals to me, an outsider, that the belief of parity between Machine Learning and "Symbolic" might be predicated more on faith than on reason.
https://news.mit.edu/2019/teaching-machines-to-reason-about-...
We aren't an ML shop ourselves; we don't claim to be. Given that we have around 100 people, we focus on what we have that's special instead of trying to compete in an overcrowded market. The idea of hybrid AI is something we see as a future part for us to play in the bigger picture of machine intelligence.
But I will affirm that Cyc is fundamentally symbolics-based. We don't position ourselves as anti-ML, because it's seriously good at a certain subset of things, but Cyc would still be fully-functional without any ML in the picture at all.
"Cyc gains an intuition about what kinds of paths of reasoning to follow when searching for conclusions"
The possible paths come purely from symbolics. But that creates a massive tree of possibilities to explore, so ML is used simply to prioritize among those subtrees.