“what do you think of gary marcus?”
Summary of results
Those are some key aspects of Gary Marcus but not the worst. The worst is that so many people listen to him. It's actually problematic because it confuses lawmakers.
Nothing. It's Gary Marcus though and he's carved a niche for himself with doing this sort of thing. It's strange to me that it's given airtime on hn but there you go.
What's wrong with Marcus Antonius?
Gary Marcus has complained his way into becoming such an authority on AI he's been in front of congress. He's never done anything and regularly contradicts himself ( claims that both they are useless but also so dangerous they should be banned).
The opposite of the type of person we should be supporting in the tech community.
I used to think Gary Marcus is a voice of reason in the AI field. Now I think he's just a moron shouting hoopla over and over again. Insecurity piling from his work not being relevant any more?
> I like Gary Marcus as a personality and I look out for his work.
That's funny, my interest in reading this article went to zero the moment I saw he wrote it.
Because he's Gary Marcus. The man has made his entire media personality about dissing AI, and he's been doing it a lot longer than LLMs have been around.
I don't want to sound hateful, but Gary Marcus really does seem to have found a nice niche as "pessimisti research scientist". most everytime I see him pop up it's to explain, usually pretty well, why X model isn't actually intelligent, conscious, etc. - often when he has just written a book or article
It would not appear Gary Marcus is a fan of OpenAI [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=twitter.com/garymarcu...
Saved you another click if you also have never heard of this person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Marcus
Gary Marcus is unquestionably one of the most negative , and consistently wrong voices in the AI community. I do not understand why he is continued to be given credence or ears to anything he claims.
Seconding reports that Gary Marcus is almost as big a waste of your time as Jurgen Schmidhuber.
Marcus has been writing some variant of exactly the same article multiple times a year for the last 15 years.
With all due respect, Gary Marcus is turning himself into a parody of Jürgen Schmidhuber. All he talks and writes about, to anyone who would listen, is how the work of others, that resulted in products that millions of people love, isn't good enough. He's a bit like that snob who when invited to taste the best falafel in town complains incessantly that it isn't a Michelin 3 star meal. Yes, we know it isn't. It's a falafel. And it's delicious.
Really I'd say it is coined by Gary Marcus. At least that's who I first heard discuss it.
Gary Marcus is not an expert, he is a pundit. This is mostly a rehashing of his opinion, with his opinion being cited as evidence of facts.
Gary Marcus is my shamelessness role model. Twenty years ago he staked out his academic turf in "The Algebraic Mind", and he's been bravely and publicly defending it even as it's getting blatantly falsified in real time and in full view of the entire world. If I had even half of his shameless grittiness and perseverance I would be immeasurably more successful in all aspects of my life.
I am a PhD student working in learning and autonomy space and every researcher I know thinks Gary Marcus is a joke. I'm not saying he doesn't know things, but all I am saying is machine learning at scale is not his area of expertise although he pretends it is. Period. He passes on very generic, obvious statements about the future without any details and when someone does something in that direction he claims 'I told you so!, you should have listened to me in the past!'. Look at the entire chain of discussion between Gary Marcus and Yann LeCun in this thread you'll get a sense of I am talking about: https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1523305857420824576
Gary Marcus is an academic grifter and to me he is no different than crypto bros who grift non-experts.
Gary Marcus is the definition of petty. He brands himself as an ai skeptic but in reality he's just a clout chaser more obsessed with being right and his own image than anything else.
In his mind he is always right. Every single tweet he made, every single sentence he has said is never wrong. He is 100% right everyone else is 100% wrong.
Gary Marcus has become attention seeking lately. I unfollowed him. Most of his posts were attacks on other people instead of genuine contributions on how we can make AI actually better and safer.
Easy to criticize, much harder to offer effective solutions.
Why did people downvote my comment? Gary Marcus is known for saying things like this but there are also high-profile people who disagree and this article makes it out like all experts are saying this
Gary Marcus' contribution to the field is to post the same rant about how it's not real intelligence, every 6 months. Why does he keep getting up voted?
Gary Marcus is the Glenn Greenwald of AI. Doesn't mean he is wrong, just that he's always spitting venom like cut snake in his proclamations.
You don't like OpenAI Gary, we get it.
Like Yann LeCun said, Gary Marcus has contributed exactly nothing to the field, he's an influencer that claims to be an expert. Just ignore him.
Yeah. I don't trust Gary Marcus, and I don't know why the media buys into his persona.
Gary Marcus features a Forbes story in his Twitter bio, "7 Must-Read Books About Artificial Intelligence". That's an article which Gary Marcus paid for (that's what "Forbes Contributor" means; they're cheap, too!). This makes alarm bells go off.
Marcus was one of the founders of "Geometric Intelligence", which was acquired by Uber. 3 months later, Marcus left Uber, and claimed he remained a "special advisor"[0] to Uber; when Recode said he was no longer employed at all[1]. By my reading, it's possible Geometric Intelligence was just a patent troll, and was acquired simply for its patents[2][3].
Select extracts from that Wired piece:
> The company has filed for at least one patent, Marcus says. But it hasn't published research or offered a product
> But Marcus paints deep neural nets as an extremely limited technology, because the vast swaths of data needed to train them aren't always available. Geometric Intelligence, he says, is building technology that can train machines with far smaller amounts of data.
[uh oh; my BS detector just went off.]
I heard Marcus published papers on AI; does anyone know if they're any good?
Is this guy just a successful self-promoter? Why is he being paraded by media as the AI expert? Why does he sound so shady? (especially with that Forbes link, yikes; sorry but I can't take anyone seriously who pays for fake positive news stories).
I mentioned this about Marcus at the end of this comment, 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32866142
(I should also add: when the media has "go-to" experts, they're not primarily selected for their expertise, per-se, but for how "available" and eager they are to respond to all interview requests; I've seen the other side of that curtain.)
[0]: https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/the-head-of-ubers-ai-labs-i...
[1]: https://www.vox.com/2017/3/8/14863560/uber-ai-gary-marcus-ge...
[2]: https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/124838-92#overview
[3]: https://www.wired.com/2016/12/uber-buys-mysterious-startup-m...
Does Gary Marcus do research anymore, or literally just spend all of his time making weak but loud arguments against any AI with a neural network attached to it?
I get the impression that at one time he was trying to do AI (or similar) research, but it didn't involve neural networks. And ever since neural networks turned out to be a useful approach, because it wasn't the path he chose, he switched his career to putting down any AI with a neural network.
The most annoying thing is that they aren't very well written arguments and he doesn't come up with new ones, much less actual competitive alternative approaches to AI.
Also I think that we really do need alternatives to the giant black-box neural networks that are more predictable and auditable but also perform. Yet you never hear him talking about doing any such research.
It would be less disappointing if his background was as the owner of a 1990s-style furniture store in Queens. But supposedly he is a researcher.
It's Gary Marcus, again, as always and as ever, criticizing other people's work as "machines that manipulate data but aren't really intelligent."
He's been on HN many times before, always criticizing the same things:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
As far as I know, all he's ever done is criticize, without ever delving into the mathematical details.
To understand those who disagree with him, read "The Bitter Lesson" by Rich Sutton:
http://incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
--
EDITS: Modified and rearranged sentences to reflect more accurately what I meant to write the first time around.
Gary Marcus is a notorious Goal Post Mover so this is no surprise coming from him.
Edit: Gwern has an extensive history with this so I'll let him do the talking.
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/v8yyv6/somewhat_c...
Further Edits: Not to mention Scott Alexander who has directly rebutted you numerous times. Or Yann LeCunn. Not sure who exactly is backing down.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/my-bet-ai-size-solves-...
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/somewhat-contra-marcus...
https://analyticsindiamag.com/yann-lecun-resumes-war-of-word...
Presumably you approach these arguments like Ben Shapiro and imagine you have "Dunked on the Deep Learning geeks with Facts and Logic."
> It's Gary Marcus "neural networks don't really work" suddenly discovering they do,
I'm not familiar with Gary Marcus's arguments, but perhaps there's a bit of an misinterpretation or mind-reading going on with this specific point? Not sure, but one of the first comments on the article said the following as a possible explanation.
> Gary Marcus has tried to explain this. Current AI bots are dangerous precisely because they combine LLM abilities with LLM unreliability and other LLM weaknesses.
Gary Marcus is so deep into the "connectionism doesnt work" rabbit hole that he'd deny his own sentience if it turned out he was made of silicon.
I just ignore him as he only appears to be getting more and more incorrect.
People in the field knows the political war led by Gary Marcus. He is writing articles like this since many years now. My own experience with him left me with bad taste about his depth of knowledge and his ability to generate meaningful insights. I found him pointlessly criticizing deep learning papers without actually understanding them (on one instance, even without actually reading the paper) and then use other peoples technical comments to make case for his agenda. He keeps harping on problem X and Y for deep learning while none of his “symbolic AI” stuff has ever worked anywhere close to anything significant. Fortunately for him, he is a professor and so others in the field have to entertain him constantly.
> says Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist who sold an AI startup to Uber in 2016
for context, Marcus has a quite bearish view on AI and lots of others, most prominently Yann LeCun, disagree with Marcus.
Gary Marcus built almost entirely his public reputation (which is positively correlated with his income) by antagonizing whatever Deep Learning scientist he could reach. He speaks badly about people that worked hard with their hands, brains and souls to make incredibly complex things happen.
Yann Lecun, which I personally met a couple of times, is in a way another sort of typical character: the ever-childish researcher that likes money a lot, to the point of accepting a prestigious role in one of the most deplorable companies in the modern world (at least from an ethical perspective). He also like attention and public display of status: he can’t resist to pick a fight with Gary. From a pure research perspective he’s long dead.
The question is: do we have enough of those two? Can we move on? Thanks.
I mean he's free to hold whatever political opinions. But yeah... he is a contrarian hater usually childish and I hate the sensationalist manner he uses to present things, everything is insanely important and we must act *NOW* and all that. Ever since he was apart that hearing at congress I now view every Gary Marcus tweet through the lens of him desperately wanting to become part of some transnational ai oversight organisation. I just hope he doesn't get any power
> It's Gary Marcus "neural networks don't really work" suddenly discovering they do, and literally trying to shut down research in that area while keeping his prefered research areas funded
Gary Marcus has been aware that neural nets work for a while now, but he is only in the spotlight for his contrarian take, if he stops having a contrarian take he disappears, because it's not like he is producing any research worth of discussion otherwise. So you can expect him to stay contrarian forever. What might have been a genuine take initially is now his job, that's how he makes money, and it's so associated with him that it's probably his identity as well.
"Neural networks don't really work" isn't an accurate representation of Marcus' position, and his actual position hasn't been shown to be wrong unless you believe that LLMs and diffusion models display, or are manifestly on the way towards displaying, understanding. That is something many think, and it's not in itself an unreasonable view. However there are also plenty of reasons to think otherwise and many, including me, who haven't conceded the point. It hasn't been settled beyond reasonable debate.
To assume that the person you disagree with can only hold their view out of cynical self-interest, wishful thinking or plain insanity is to assume that you are so obviously right that there can be no valid debate. That is a bad starting position and I'd recommend against it as a matter of principle. Apart from anything else, however convinced you are of your own rightness it's plain rude to assume everyone else is equally convinced, and ad-hominem to ascribe negative motives to those who disagree.
As for Gary Marcus, as far as I've seen he's been consistent in his views and respectful in the way he's argued them. To read about him on HN you'd think he's spent the last few years badmouthing every AI researcher around, but I haven't seen that, just disagreement with people's statements - i.e. healthy debate. I haven't followed him closely though, so if you know of any cases where he's gone beyond that and said the sorts of things about AI researchers that people routinely say about him I'd interested to see them.
Oh, joy, another completely unoriginal contribution to the GPT-3 discourse adding absolutely nothing of value.
I particularly dislike the endorsement of Gary Marcus as an authority on ML/AI when he has only spread skepticism and FUD.
Sure, he can sound strident but I still think Gary Marcus's riffing on the limitations of deep learning is important.
The book "Rebooting AI" that he wrote with Ernest Davis is well worth reading if you are an AI practitioner (a term I use to describe myself). I think Marcus is also well worth following on Twitter to get a contrarian view (he re-tweeted me two weeks ago, so there is some overlap in our points of view).
Way back when, I liked Roger Penrose's 1989 book "The Emperor's New Mind" even though some of the people I worked with thought he was a devil for writing that. I am much more optimistic than Marcus, but find his work useful and thoughtful.
Gary Marcus is sort of a troll, but I'm glad that someone is taking on this nonsense in a formal setting. I think that most sensible people treat it as an amusing curiosity, but it's popping up in unfortunate settings, like student essay and, of all places, peer reviews! There are some sensible uses, for example, code boiler plate, or, for that matter, more-or-less any boiler plate. And the amusing uses, like poetry, are...amusing. And at least it's not self-driving people into walls! But the concerns raised in this essay are mostly cogent, and not, by any means, the only concerns as I'm sure that the creativity of bad actors will flourish!
Is Marcus trying to create the impression that somehow he is a more impactful AI contributor than LeCun? It's going to be a tough sell because I know LeCun's name from his technical work whereas I know Marcus' name from him constantly moaning about LeCun on social media. In what _tangible_ ways did Marcus contribute?
I don't subscribe to him either. Some people do, apparently.
Ted Gioia is totally worth it. I haven't looked at Greil Marcus' stuff yet.
This wasn’t written by a reporter. Takes one second to scroll to the end of article:
> Gary Marcus is a scientist, entrepreneur and bestselling author. He was founder and CEO of machine learning company Geometric Intelligence, which was acquired by Uber, and is the author of six books, including the forthcoming Taming Silicon Valley (MIT Press)
My view is that the Gary Marcus argument is deeply wrong. Here's why.
Current methods are far from perfect, but not for the reasons Marcus believes. Consider that we /should/ be able to derive hypotheses for better system behavior from a given critique, test those proposed system improvements, and then (if the hypothesis is correct) see some improvement. Marcus' crew hasn't produced any useful improvements; this is either because they are not technically competent or their hypotheses are wrong. Given that people have been hammering at these systems for ~10 years now, I doubt the failure to build better logic-based systems (or hybrid systems) is for lack of trying.
Meanwhile, the non-Marcus groups have been improving systems by leaps and bounds, through exactly the kind of iterative, hypothesis-driven improvement I described above. Certainly nothing is perfect, but we can see real progress happening.
(Finally; Tesla FSD is a strawman. It's Waymo you need to argue with, and they're doing great, AFAICT.)
That's a false dichotomy. Select the name Gary Marcus, right-click, and search (on my browser it defaults to Duck Duck Go, but that returns the right result).
The Mindscape Podcast is hosted by Sean Carroll. You have a very sharp quantum physicist interviewing an expert in the field of AI research.
The podcast is worth the time, and the quote is representative of an expert's take on the matter. He elaborates, but I don't need to write an essay just to argue on the internet.
If you know about the author of this post Gary Marcus you can just as easily ascribe accusations of fear, The Denial of Uncertainties, Hype and self-promotion/grifting
I did not intend to attack Gary or so in any way. But I realize that my statement is probably too strong. Of course it's not the whole AI community. My intention with my post was just to give some perspective, some background for people who have not heard about Gary Marcus before.
Maybe I'm also in a bubble, but I was speaking mostly about the people I frequently read from, i.e. lots of people from Google Brain, DeepMind, other people who frequently publish on NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, etc. Among those people, Gary is usually not taken seriously. At least that was my impression.
But let's not make this so much about Gary: Most of these people disagree with the opinion that Gary shares, i.e. they don't really see such a big need for symbolic AI, or they see much more potential in pure neural approaches (after all, the human brain is fully neural).
Someone needs to host a simple website with a timeline of every goalpost Gary moves further into public space as the years go on.
This website will need ddos and legal protection, because Marcus will be furious and might sue.
Just how much of social status armor do ascendant pundits really have? We'll see.
He's a fool who hurls criticisms, gets repeatedly disproven, and doesn't actually execute on anything. It's obvious why le cun's words carry more weight; he and his labs get shit done; he speaks from experience, not sophistry.
In other words, Gary Marcus has managed to match some linguistic sub-patterns between two articles, but has not proved he is intelligent.
The first time I saw his act I couldn't believe anyone would laugh at this.
Time goes by and his appearances on H Stern would leave me in stitches. He could play an audience, whether 1 person or an auditorium, like a violin.
Genius level up there with Norm and Patton. For a sample search youtube and his 'you fool' bit during Hollywood Squares.
Fun fact: He could talk like a normal person when he wanted to. There's audio of Gary D talking to him on the phone.
Fun fact 2: Gary D went to his apartment after he had been living there 3 years and he was still using plastic lawn furniture until he bought some real furninture. He was already a millionaire by this point.
"Gary V" is probably the biggest huckster, although the universe of 'hustle culture' charlatans is wide and deep.
Just search "ChatGPT" and look for thumbnails where they're making mouth-agape "I'm Shocked!!" faces and an all-caps title about making money.
I've always liked Garry.
Marcus' moaning gets old, especially when his criticism is so self-referential; he's hardly the only voice against AI hype, though no doubt he's one of the loudest.
However he does seem to have legitimate complaints about the echo chamber the big names seem to be operating in.
Marcus' moaning gets old, especially when his criticism is so self-referential; he's hardly the only voice against AI hype, though no doubt he's one of the loudest.
However he does seem to have legitimate complaints about the echo chamber the big names seem to be operating in.
I think Marcus’s problem here is less with not being given credit as it is with how LeCun has suddenly shifted to similar opinions without any attempt at reconciling how, until very recently, he openly denigrated Marcus and his ideas.
What I like about Garry:
* I like his rational vision for San Francisco
* I like his investments in San Francisco
* I like how he's fighting corrupt SF politicians
What I don't like about Garry:
* Can be quite sensitive and unprofessional sometimes
* Is/was a crypto bro
Marcus has made some very good contributions, including both original research and a good exposition/popularisation of a fairly mainstream skeptical view.
Because Marcus isn't a practitioner and never has been. He's a public intellectual from a different field acting like he's an AI expert. You would never listen to criticisms of a Physics theory from a Biologist and you shouldn't listen to criticisms of Neural Networks from a Psychologist.
He's proven time and time again that he doesn't understand the methods at work and doesn't even seem interested in trying to do so.
I think he is by default less interested in gigantic black box systems that he can't fit in his head, and that secondly he has read Gary Marcus thinkpiece and was persuaded by him, and thirdly I feel like there might be some kind of religion thing but I don't have direct evidence of that third one.
Here is what Knuth has said, related to why he isn't as curious as you might expect:
> "Gary Marcus's column in the April CACM brilliantly describes the terrifying consequences of these developments. [...] I myself shall certainly continue to leave such research to others, and to devote my time to developing concepts that are authentic and trustworthy. And I hope you do the same. [...] The topic [LLMs] is timely, and important enough not to ignore completely, but it's emphatically not for me."
What ever happened to Gary Bernhardt? I miss his funny insight and those fantastic screencasts of his, they've shaped my way of thinking about code architecture
There was an interview with Marcus on Sean Carroll’s podcast show recently. He seems to be more of an advocate for a hybrid approach than a one or the other guy (symbolic or gradients). https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2022/02/14/184-...
Jesus Christ though, it is pretty embarrassing about the Nethack result.
Marcus bought HonestDollar, which is in the same space, a while ago, and has rebranded it as "Marcus Invest"
I've never heard of Garry Tan before just now, but he didn't strike me as "overtly charismatic" in the linked article. He struck me as incredibly unhinged and unlikeable.
Marcus has been on HN many times before, always criticizing other people's work as "machines that manipulate data but aren't really intelligent, because they have no understanding of the world:" https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... . For a good summary of the opposing viewpoint, which disagrees with Marcus, read "The Bitter Lesson" by Rich Sutton: http://incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
In many ways, what we're seeing is a modern-day rehash of the "symbolic" versus "connectionist" approaches to AI, with critics like Marcus on the "symbolic" camp ("we need more understanding!") and engineers and scientists who build AI systems, like Sutton, on the "connectionist" camp ("we need more computation!").
There are also AI researchers seeking to bridge the two approaches. Here's a recent example that seems significant to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34108047 . Maybe we will eventually find that the "symbolic" and "connectionist" approaches are actually not different, as people like Minsky contended?
This is such a case of a bad-comment that seems clever and insightful. It boils down to saying we don't need to debate or even consider the content of his arguments because we can assume he's only motivated by prestige and money (but without considering the second-order effects on his credibility and funding if he actually turns out to be proven substantially wrong in the future).
I don't know how right or wrong he is - none of us do. That's why it's all still being debated.
The one thing I know is that we can only truly understand a topic by fully understanding arguments for and against all the claims. I also know the pro-LLM set have way more money (double-digit billions as we saw just this week) and credibility to lose over this topic than Gary Marcus does.
> Comments by Home Depot Inc. co-founder Bernie Marcus that “nobody works, nobody gives a damn,” with possible implications for the future of capitalism
The implication being that founders don't understand capitalism? You get what you pay for.
What do you think about Good and Real by Gary L. Drescher? I wrote about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38789146, so it's not perfect, but I haven't found anything that is.
Jürgen Schmidhuber is complaining that he already invented being an AI troll years ago and now Gary Marcus is brazenly using his techniques without giving him credit.
Well, most of the other sources would hate that I think there's something to get out of Marx too! Jim Grant is about as hardcore libertarian as you can get. The longer I watch and trade markets the more I see the value of ideological flexibility and being able to synthesize many different and even contradictory perspectives.
>I am surprised by how dismissive the whole post sounds.
I wouldn't be surprised, it's Gary Marcus. He's an academic with a lot of prestige to lose if the LLM approach is actually good/useful/insightful, who's only widely publicly known now because AI has had a backlash and media needed an expert to quote for "the other side". Same as the computational linguistics researchers who always get quoted for the same reason.
In general, academics in competing fields whose funding threatens to get tanked or eclipsed by research approaches that work on principles they have fundamental academic disagreements with are going to talk negatively about the tech, no matter what it is achieving. Where I think it can be valuable to listen to them is when they're giving the technology credit - generally they'll only do that when it's something really undeniable or potentially concerning.
This is fully pathetic. I expect poor quality from Marcus bit this really takes the cake.
>LeCun, 2022: Reinforcement learning will also never be enough for intelligence; Marcus, 2018: “ it is misleading to credit deep reinforcement learning with inducing concept[s] ”
> “I think AI systems need to be able to reason,"; Marcus 2018: “Problems that have less to do with categorization and more to do with commonsense reasoning essentially lie outside the scope of what deep learning is appropriate for, and so far as I can tell, deep learning has little to offer such problems.”
>LeCun, 2022: Today's AI approaches will never lead to true intelligence (reported in the headline, not a verbatim quote); Marcus, 2018: “deep learning must be supplemented by other techniques if we are to reach artificial general intelligence.”
These are LeCun's supposed great transgressions? Vague statements that happen to be vaguely similar to Marcus' vague statements?
Marcus also trots out random tweets to show how supported his position is and one mentions a Marcus paper with 800 citations as being "engaged in the literature". But a paper like Attention is all you need that currently has over 40,000 citations. THAT is a paper the community is engaged with. Not something with less than 1/50th the citations.
This is a joke...
It's more of a case of reverse Gell-Mann Amnesia where Marcus is so blinded by his bone to pick with DL that he doesn't realize that Scott is as right/reasonable in writing about AI as those other topics.
This is mostly just an angry rant, yes, but equally it is just true. Marcus is intellectually dishonest.
>> Of course it's not the whole AI community. My intention with my post was just to give some perspective, some background for people who have not heard about Gary Marcus before.
Yes, I get it. And the perspective you wanted to give was to not take Marcus seriously because the people you follow on social media say he's not to be taken seriously. That's nothing but a form of collective online bullying that attacks the person and not the opinion, and like I say in my other comment above, shameful.
Consider for a moment the impression that you make when you say that some people you know, when they're not publishing on NeurIPS, are on social media dogpiling on someone who criticises their work. That's not researchers any more, but common social media trolls.
>> But let's not make this so much about Gary: Most of these people disagree with the opinion that Gary shares, i.e. they don't really see such a big need for symbolic AI, or they see much more potential in pure neural approaches (after all, the human brain is fully neural).
To my experience, the majority of neural net researchers don't know anything concrete about symbolic AI, just what they have heard second-hand, usually on social media again, usually by people who disagree with Marcus, who's the most famous proponent of neuro-symbolic AI (NeSy). So whatever opinion they have on NeSy is not an informed opinion.
There's plenty of literature on NeSy which is a bona fide field of research with a conference etc. This year Leslie Valiant was the keynote speaker and Yan LeCun the honoured guest:
https://sites.google.com/view/nesy2023
You really don't have to listen to what Marcus says to form an opinion on NeSy. Btw, I am not with them and I think they're going the wrong way, but at least I know what they're doing. That is much less than can be said about most neural net researchers, who rarely know anything outside their own work besides whatever preprint is trending on X. That's to the detriment of nobody but themselves.
> Last time I saw Marcus he was a co-organizer of a panel on Doug Lenat and Knowledge Representation in AAAI 2024
Next year he'll be teaming up with Rudy Giuliani to tout the success of SHRLDU at Four Seasons Landscaping.
The AI community asked GPT-4 to send him an invite, and he accepted.
Who has ever had respect for Marc? this is just another example in the long list of reasons he's a complete piece of shit