Cyc - Wikipedia

The need for a massive symbolic artificial intelligence project of this ilk was born in the early 1980s out of a large number of experiences early AI researchers had, in the previous 25 years, wherein their AI programs would generate encouraging early results but then fail to "scale up"--fail to cope with novel situations and problems outside the narrow area they were conceived and engineered to cope with. Douglas Lenat and Alan Kay publicized this need,[1][2][3] and organized a meeting at Stanford in 1983 to consider the problem; the back-of-the-envelope calculations by them and colleagues including Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, Edward Feigenbaum, and John McCarthy indicated that that effort would require between 1000 and 3000 person-years of effort, hence not fit into the standard academic project model. Fortuitously, events within a year of that meeting enabled that Manhattan-Project-sized effort to get underway. The project was started in July,1984 as the flagship project of the 400-person Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation, a research consortium started by two dozen large United States based corporations "to counter a then ominous Japanese effort in AI, the so-called "fifth-generation" project."[4] The US Government reacted to the Fifth Generation threat by passing the National Cooperative Research Act of 1984, which for the first time allowed US companies to "collude" on long-term high-risk high-payoff research, and MCC and Sematech sprang up to take advantage of that ten-year opportunity.