Douglas B. Lenat is founder and president of Cycorp, which promotes research in and commercialization of the CYC system. He has been a professor of computer science at Carnegie-Mellon University and Stanford University, where he remains a consulting professor. He has written hundreds of publications, including Knowledge-Based Systems in Artificial Intelligence, Building Expert Systems, Knowledge Representation, and Building Large Knowledge-Based Systems. His 1976 Stanford thesis earned him the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence's Computers and Thought Award, and he is one of the original fellows of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. His primary interest is in "building and using machine intelligence to amplify our mental abilities ... AI should enable us to solve harder problems, think faster, and be more creative."

Lenat spent two decades doing pioneering research in natural-language understanding, automatic program synthesis, and machine learning. But in 1984, he concluded that "each of these areas of Artificial Intelligence has hit a brick wall -- the very same brick wall -- namely the need for our programs to have the same breadth and depth of common-sense knowledge as people do. To achieve that, I'm afraid that elegant, 'free lunch' tactics are not going to substitute for long, hard work. It's time to bite the bullet." Lenat therefore formed the CYC common-sense project at MCC in 1984; the project reached fruition, as planned, after a decade and spun off as a separate company, Cycorp.