Certain elements of the blogosphere are abuzz with news that Austin, TX’s Cycorp is about to release an AI, “Cyc,” on the Internet. With a mission to learn and build its knowledge, it will accelerate its new knowledge acquisition by interacting with netizens and siphoning multimedia information on the Web.

In a New Scientist article on the release, Justin Mullins writes, “one of Cyc’s most impressive features is the quality of the deductions it can make about things it has never learned about directly. For example, it can tell whether two animals are related without having been programmed with the explicit relationship between each animal we know of.” At the moment, Cyc does not contain the knowledge base to provide answers to interact with others in a meaningful manner. In three to five years, however, its creators predict that it will.