I'm somewhat skeptical if AI can be built by extrapolating the Cyc project. At best we'll get a sophisticated QA bot. I feel that vision is central to human cognition, and the Cyc project seems to be all about relationships of words to words, without any relations to vision stuff, images and video.
I like I said I mentioned Cyc more because it is interesting then anything else. However, I do believe words and local image parts are just cognitive concepts and they will eventually be handled using the same algorithms, see e.g. the Socher et.al. paper I referenced above.
However, I am not so sure how this fits together with planning and acting autonomously (which would fall under reinforcement learning). But I wasn't really talking about building strong AI, just building an AI which is strong enough to convince people it is human during a 30 minute conversation.
