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.

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.

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.

As someone else who is not an Altman fan and generally skeptical of people pushing weird AGI scenarios:

I do not think Gary Marcus has anything interesting to say about current AI, and by that, I mean anything that's not a cheap gotcha, restatement of an obvious fact, or something entirely disingenuous.

I kinda feel sorry for Gary Marcus. He’s carved this niche as an LLM critic and must have been delighted to have this bug to post about.

I stopped reading his Substack because he was always trying to find a negative. Meanwhile I use LLMs most days and find them very useful.

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

I feel like at this point gary marcus is an exhaustion attack on peoples’ brains, and he cannot seem to escape bad faith reasoning regarding anything involving llms.

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.

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.

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.

What has Gary Marcus done to be considered "The wisest people in your field"? Looking at his Wikipedia page, he seems like a professor who wrote a couple books. I don't see why I should privilege his view over people at OpenAI (who make functional and innovative products rather than books).

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 saying what Gary Marcus always says.

According to him five years ago, LLMs and image generators should never have been possible at all. Now that they're here and work so well, he's insisting they're a dead end. The man is best off ignored.

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.

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...

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.

Gary Marcus is cringe and wrong, but it's good to listen to folks who are cringe and wrong, because very occasionally, their willingness to be cringe means they're not wrong about something everyone thinks is true.

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."

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.

I lost faith in Marcus after just a few interactions. He is indeed what one would refer to as "crackpot" in academia. The most glaring thing was that he is technically extremely shallow and don't have a clue about most of the details. I also got impression that is enormously enamored with having attention and recognition at any cost. Depending on weather, he will change directions and views, basically just do anything it took to get that attention no matter how ridiculous he looks doing that.

While writing this, it occured to me that he would get even goose bumps at reading this comment because it, after all, I am giving him attention.

Regarding Gary Marcus, the author of this piece, and his long and bizarre history of motivated carelessness on the topic of deep learning:

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/v8yyv6/somewhat_c...

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.

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.

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?

It's also Marcus's best interest to push "LLM is hitting a wall" agenda. Check his blog. It's basically his whole online personality now.

So Marcus and Altman are both speaking out of their agendas, except Altman has a product and Marcus has... a book.

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.

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

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 Marcus. By all accounts, he doesn't understand how LLMs work, so usually he's wrong about technical matters.[a]

But here, I think he's right about business matters. The massive investment in computing capacity we've seen in recent years, by Open AI and others, can generate positive returns only if the technology continues to improve rapidly so it can overcome its limitations and failure modes in the short run.

If the rate of improvement has slowed down, even temporarily, OpenAI and others like Anthropic are likely to face financial difficulties.

---

[a] In the words of Geoff Hinton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7ltNiRrDHQ

---

Note: At the moment, the OP is flagged. To the mods: It shouldn't be, because it conforms to the HN guidelines.

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

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.

Marcus has made some very good contributions, including both original research and a good exposition/popularisation of a fairly mainstream skeptical view.

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

Who doesn't love Garry Tan? I've never read a single negative word about him. If he's betting against you, best watch out.

That means YOU, The City and Public Officials of San Francisco. Wake up.

Your city is messed up and smelly, and it's time to take out the trash and clean the dirt from the streets (literally).

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.

>marc andreessen bad

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.

To me neurosymbolic seems to be a mostly tribal distinction. Also Gary Marcus is just trying to make Google's achievement all about himself again because he's a narcissist. But what else is new

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.

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.

You're doing pretty much exactly the dance here: https://twitter.com/natosaichek/status/1657422437951369218

Note that this is agreeing with a Gary Marcus Tweet - Gary Marcus not exactly being an AI hypester.

But of course there are some people for whom playing the role of real-no-bs-computer-knower is so attractive that no number of people like him, Geoffrey Hinton, Stuart Russell etc publicly worrying about x-risk will impact their tone of dismissive certitude. Are you one of those people?

What do you think about Marc Andreessen's comments on the topic?

https://twitter.com/benaverbook/status/1861511166436004210

This is mostly just an angry rant, yes, but equally it is just true. Marcus is intellectually dishonest.

What I've heard about Garry Tan so far suggests he is childish and out of touch.

- He blocks random people on Twitter over the slightest disagreement.

- He capriciously refused a once-in-ten-thousand-lifetimes offer from Peter Thiel for the safety of a steady paycheck at Microsoft. Someone who is that risk-averse really shouldn't be role-playing as Tupac.

How can he be a role-model to the thousands of founders who typically take massive personal risks with no backup plan?

Hard to take Gary seriously calling out "outlandish claims" with "no substance" when he does the same thing in the opposite direction.

Garbage article for clicks to pay for his lifestyle, now that he's grifted his way into being an "AI Expert" paid to pontificate with no skin in the game.

That's Cory's whole schtick - he critiques big corps. I follow him a bit and most times his analysis is good and other times he dismisses things that don't fit in his ideological viewpoint.

> "Well this has been interesting indeed. Studying the task of

how to fake it certainly leads to insightful subproblems galore.

As well as fun conversations during meals. On the other hand, 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."

Oh he doesn't like it. These are some academically phrased burns.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/marc-andre...

Not only is that a logical fallacy (appeal to authority) but magnus lost to him and is claiming cheating which is clearly a huge conflict of interest. His opinion should be heavily scrutinized.

In a similar boat, and I find Marcus weird. Initially I thought he had some valid complaints but the more and more I heard the more he was pushing it into unreasonable territory (maybe he started more rational and went off the deep end ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

This is a problem I have with a lot of people in the AI safety or criticism space. There's a lot to criticize LLMs and AI for. There are a lot of real and concerning things that can cause real world harm, with systems we have __now__. But attacking him or any of the AI doomer/X-risk stuff just muddies the waters and makes those real conversations near impossible to have. Just primes people the wrong way. I'm not a conspiracy theorist but I'm not surprised by people that think these two groups are on the same side. Just seems like a lot of attention seeking and we can fight the hype without creating a different kind of hype...

I like Jamey Stegmaier, love his games, love the way he runs his business.

It's hilarious to me that his post generated so much discussion about flossing and variable-rate mortgages.

Anyone knows Randall Carlson's take on this ?

Aww… definitely makes you feel for the man beneath the bluster.

Most of it seems to be typical Marcus fare—basically that LLMs aren’t true AI yet are also dangerous yet are irreparably broken-but the segment on X-risk is the first time I’ve seen him comment on that, at least for a while. He starts with “I don’t want to see agents happen” basically, and… on some level I think everyone agrees with that, at least on some guttural level.

He brings it on himself (talk about a vitriolic title…), but still, I’m guessing he misses the days when all of this was a bit more calm and he didn’t have to spend his days being the eternal critic. I’m sure it’s brought him plenty of money and substack subscribers, but you can tell in this video that he’s a true academic that is seriously invested in AI as a discipline, if not as an immediate capitalist reality.

Sorry for the kinda off-topic comment, and thanks for sharing! Will have to try to catch the rest tomorrow. He looks good, which in these Dennett-less days we should certainly appreciate

I appreciate Marc fundamentally and have groaned more often than I'd like the past few years. Seems part and parcel with the online/Twitter merging with the real/hoi polloi over the past couple years. Ex. Gary Tan.

There's a certain kind of absolutist banner-waving people use to communicate with ingroups that is obviously foul to someone hearing it out of context.

That last manifesto he wrote was funny to me and an excellent example.

As someone who had been in LLMs/AI art since 2020, it came across as Marc wanted to signal their appreciation for the biggest in-group during the start of the first Eternal Summer of AI. (e/acc)

The way it went overboard repeating hardcore edgy ideas, untempered by any reality because they came from 200 follower anons, suffered heavily from that in-group absolutist communication leading to out-group confusion.

And it is all too much peering into eachother's minds for my taste. At the end of the day, guy wrote blog post because he was excited.

I think most of us had a lot of respect for Marc because of the Netscape days but hopefully we can now all agree that he’s become a total fraud motivated by greed. His whole-hearted embrace of everything crypto despite being obviously smart enough to know most of it was a Ponzi was the last straw for me. He’ll do anything to win the VC game.

At this point when I see that a company got Andreesen Horowitz money I think about it as one step above SoftBank money in terms of negative signals.

I haven't looked at him very closely, but I'm not sure how to read Jim Cramer.

Just observing his onscreen personality at face value: He's very loud and bold, erratic, yelling ridiculous things at the audience in a Philly accent (no offense to Philly on that ... it just lends itself to a particular stereotype, like he may as well be at a bar talking about the Eagles). When his investments are bad, you can just say oh, the guy is a blowhard, not basing his opinions on keen intellectual insight; it's all entertainment purposes and so on.

But there's another cynical angle that enters, maybe it's paranoid to say but I think it's plausible: Does he have personal stake in his advice? Does he have some connections at these companies telling him to boost the stocks on air? That would enter into the realm of fraud. I guess when people confidently urge others to make ruinous financial decisions, that kind of concern always enters into it.

Gary talking about himself.

Nothing really to see here.

This is literally someone on the internet arguing about pointless crap.

Ron Amadeo is so relentlessly critical of Google I've stopped reading his articles. Overall I find coverage on Ars to be pretty good but he really seems to have an axe to grind.

He spends much time labeling and psychoanalyzing the people who disagree with him

[...]

But in the last few years, as his firm a16z took in $7.6B of capital to make a disastrous bet on “Web3”, while charging LPs an estimated $1B in management fees for the privilege, he’s been putting out a stream of disingenuous and logically-invalid arguments.

For those who didn’t follow Marc’s Web3 debacle, I’ve kept the receipts:

Criticizing pmarca for not engaging with the core of the argument, while simultaneously bringing up "receipts" for unrelated criticisms is odd. This behavior is more consistent with someone who has an axe to grind than with someone who is offended by 'poor “sportsmanship”' in discourse.

Of course it is absurd. Mr. Marcus' entire schtick is absurd criticisms of LLMs, and absurd demands of anyone who creates them.

i get the joke but reminds me of a good talk where some googlers got a little upset when gary taubes started going into the problems with CICO thinking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6vpFV6Wkl4

Marc Andreessen spouting off at the mouth about things he doesn't understand?? I can't believe it! /sarcasm

I had been reading Marginal Revolution and following Cowen for probably 5 years but I finally completely gave up on him.

At first I was deeply impressed and considered him someone who was unafraid to confront challenging issues with thoughtful analysis.

Now I see him as a Malcolm Gladwell style entertainer.

Anybody thinking of taking him too seriously should do some meta-research of their own before spending a lot of time on his ideas.

I've never heard Andreesen say anything I thought was particularly insightful or intelligent. He seems like a caricature of a Silicon Valley programmer who got lucky and made a bunch of money who now thinks that makes him a genius thought leader for the rest of his life. I hate his tagline "software is eating the world" If a homeless person standing outside a grocery store said these things you wouldn't listen because the sound like the ravings of a crank.

I felt that way until he had Carlson on. Carlson is a grade A TV talking head grifter who just spins up sensationalist narratives to drive views. No background, no expertise, just a guy who mastered which buttons to push to get average joe's raging.

Lex says he wants open honest conversation, but Carlson was just doing the same stunningly dishonest grift he does every time he has a mic in front of him. So dumb.

> Marcan certainly can be abrasive (I mean lol, so can Linus)

My impression of a few glancing online interactions is that they're both abrasive but marcan is quite unwise in a way that Linus has had beaten out of him