“what do you think of gary marcus?”
Summary of results
Gary Marcus tends to have pretty shallow analysis or points.
His takes often remind me of Jim Cramer’s stock analysis — to the point I’d be willing to bet on the side of a “reverse Gary Marcus”.
I find Marcus tiresome for many reasons. I look for writing with testable claims and good argumentation. He comes across as evangelical. Am I missing something?
Sure, there is considerable hype around generative AI. There are plenty of flimsy business models. And plenty of overinvestment and misunderstanding of capabilities and risks. But the antidote to this is not more hyperbole.
I would like to find a rational, skeptical, measured version of Marcus. Are you out there?
There are folks that don't like anything from Gary Marcus, because he's been a nay-sayer from the beginning. This article happens to be spot on though.
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
Marcus's writing is from the perspective of someone who is situated in the branch of AI that didn't work out - symbolic systems - and has a bit of an axe to grind against LLMs.
He's not always wrong, and sometimes useful as a contrarian foil, but not a source of much insight.
He makes many very good points:
For example he continusly calls out AGI hype for what it is, and also showcases dangers of naive use of LLMs (eg. lawyers copy-pasting hallucinated cases into their documents, etc). For this, he has plenty of material!
He also makes some very bad points and worse inferences: that LLMs as a technology are useless because they can't lead to AGI, that hallucation makes LLMs useless (but then he contradicts himself in another article conceding they "may have some use"), that because they can't follow an algorithm they're useless, etc, that scaling laws are over therefore LLMs won't advance (he's been making that for a couple of years), that AI bubble will collapse in a few months (also a few years of that), etc.
Read any of his article (I've read too many, sadly) and you'll never come to the conclusion that LLMs might be a useful technology, or be "a good thing" even in some limited way. This just doesn't fit with reality I can observe with my own eyes.
To me, this shows he's incredibly biased. That's okay if he wants to be a pundit - I couldn't blame Gruber for being biased about Apple! But Marcus presents himself as the authority on AI, a scientist, showing a real and unbiased view on the field. In fact, he's as full of hype as Sam Altman is, just in another direction.
Imagine he was talking about aviation, not AI. 787 dreamliner crashes? "I've been saying for 10 years that airplanes are unsafe, they can fall from the sky!" Boeing the company does stupid shit? "Blown door shows why airplane makers can't be trusted" Airline goes bankrupt? "Air travel winter is here"
I've spoken to too many intelligent people who read Marcus, take him at his words and have incredibly warped views on the actual potential and dangers of AI (and send me links to his latest piece with "so this sounds pretty damning, what's your take?"). He does real damage.
Compare him with Simon Willison, who also writes about AI a lot, and is vocal about its shortcomings and dangers. Reading Simon, I never get the feeling I'm being sold on a story (either positive or negative), but that I learned something.
Perhaps a Marcus is inevitable as a symptom of the Internet's immune system to the huge amount of AI hype and bullshit being thrown around. Perhaps Gary is just fed up with everything and comes out guns blazing, science be damned. I don't know.
But in my mind, he's as much BSer as the AGI singularity hypers.
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.
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.
The weird thing is I generally agree with Gary on most of his points. He makes interesting observations that often turn out to be correct. But the Gary Marcus blog post pattern cannot be denied.
Marcus’s schtick is going on about things like "knockout blows, and LLM uselessness". He's kind of the go to AI/LLM naysayer.
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.
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 not an expert, he is a pundit. This is mostly a rehashing of his opinion, with his opinion being cited as evidence of facts.
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.
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.
I am not sure why people pay attention to Gary Marcus. He isn’t an expert in AI. And if you followed him in the past at all, it is obvious he has a huge amount of political bias. It is really telling that he repeatedly goes after Elon Musk, and is now making bizarre unfounded claims about propaganda, but didn’t have nearly as much to complain about with DeepSeek, which has literal government propaganda.
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.
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.
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.
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 talks about AI in a dogmatic way.
Sutton... the patron saint of scaling...
Listen to people for the their ideas, not their label.
Regardless, Marcus is a bit late to comment on the bitter lesson. That is so 6 months ago lol
Gary Marcus saying the same things Gary Marcus has always said.
It doesn’t matter what incredible things neural networks do, in his mind they’re always a dead end that will collapse any day now.
>I don't think Gary Marcus is necessarily a naysayer
Oh come on. He is by far the most well known AI poo-poo'er and it's not even close. He built his entire brand on it once he realized his own research was totally irrelevant.
Gary Marcus is just a free Outrage As A Service. People politically align with him and then feel the need to go along with the rest of the charade.
Gary Marcus is a terrific self-promoter and grifter, and there are very large audiences for that sort of stuff. It's simple.
He does more than dunks though, I don't think that's really fair to him. He's trying to position himself as a public intellectual and expert.
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.
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 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 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."
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 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.
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.
Hot take: Gary Marcus isn’t an expert in AI and his opinion is irrelevant. He regularly posts things that reflect his very biased view on things, not reality. I really am not sure what some people see that makes him worth following.
Gary Marcus has never built anything, has never contributed meaningful to any research that actually produces value, nor has he been right about any of his criticisms.
What he has done is continually move a goalpost to stay somewhat relevant in the blogsphere and presumably the academic world.
The difference between Gary Marcus and you is the capacity to tell right from wrong.
He has no problems pimping his credentials and shitting on other people's work and lying through his teeth to enrich himself. He's obviously intelligent enough to know better, but he's a singularly intellectually dishonest figure.
He's a one man version of The Enquirer or Zergnet for AI, and thrives entirely on dishonest takes and divisive commentary, subsiding on pure clickbait. There is absolutely no reason to regard anything he says with any level of seriousness or credulity, he's an unprincipled jackass cashing out unearned regard by grifting and shilling, loudly.
If you must, here's an archived link, don't reward him with clicks.
He really shouldn't end up on the top ten of HN, let alone the front page. It's like an SEO hack boosting some guy proudly documenting pictures of his bowel movements.
It’s a comment about who Gary Marcus is presenting himself as
My intention is for other people to think what I believe which is Gary Marcus is a hack and has no business being listened to with respect to technical evaluation of AI because he’s not technically competent enough to do. The existence of his polemics waste everybody’s time and generally waste resources like we’re wasting right now.
His entire schtick has been as the debunker in chief of claims of AI capabilities
If you actually look at his polemics they increasingly have nothing to do with his original argument because his original argument not only is flawed but is ignorant of the technical capabilities
This seems like a classic case of "the boy who cried wolf". Almost everything Gary Marcus says has been trivially dismissable, and often soon proven wrong.
If someone like that wants to be in a position to warn society of actual harms, they'd have to behave differently.
I find Gary to be much more of a grifter and much more dishonest than Sam Altman. He can’t recognise a clearly world changing technology, constantly pessimistic and also just wrong - dude was certain the bubble would burst last year.
At least Sam put in the work. Gary is just blabbering for years now. Anyone who even takes him a bit seriously is suspicious.
Good ai criticism is required but standards should be much higher.
My prediction: in a few years it would become clear even to normal people that this man is a charlatan.
Garry just comes across as a deeply unsavory figure deeply stuck in the far right radicalization pipeline.
He regularly calls out "Marxists" on Twitter and rails against leftists, all while supporting mass surveillance and building a dystopia.
What a yucky person.
> 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.
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 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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I don't know but the standard reply to all of Gary Marcus' criticisms is that they don't count because it's Gary Marcus, which of course is a big honking ad-hominem.
>Sam Altman has been substantially more correct on average than Gary Marcus
I've seen some of Marcus' other writing and he's definitely a colorful dude. But is Altman really right more often/substantively? Actually, the comparison shouldn't be to Altman but to the AI hype train in general.
And, while I might have missed some of Marcus's writing on specific points, on the broader themes he seems to be effectively exposing the AI hype.
I've seen this characterization of Marcus here, and it seems to follow the sentiment of the AI leaders he referenced in the article.
But, I've yet to see where he's been wrong (or, particularly more wrong than the AI-thinking and leadership he's questioning). Do you have any citations?
Also, if you stopped on seeing his name, I'd encourage you to take another look—specifically the sections wherein he discusses AI-leadership's dismissal of his doubts and their subsequent walk-backs of their own claims.
Would be interested in your take on that.
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 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?
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.
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...
As much as you may dislike Gary Marcus or as much as you may like him, he is right about the state of Ai agents for now, and how it looks like they may finish the year. I outline how he can be proved wrong, if developers are willing to put in the work.
Call me a cynic, but Gary Marcus and Sam Altman are the last people I want to read about AGI and related topics.
Gary has invested heavily in an anti-AI persona, continually forecasting AI Winters despite wave after wave of breakthroughs.
Sam, on the other hand, is not just an AI enthusiast; he speaks in a manner designed to build the brand, influence policy, and continuously boost OpenAI's valuation and consolidate its power. It's akin to asking the Pope whether Catholicism is true.
Of course, there might indeed be significant roadblocks ahead. It’s also possible that OpenAI might outpace its competitors—although, as of now, Gemini 2.5 Pro holds the lead. Nevertheless, whenever we listen to highly biased figures, we should always take their claims with a grain of salt.
Pretty ironic that he complains about Kahn citing someone who told him AI agents are capable of replacing 80% of call center employees, right after quoting Gary Marcus of all people, claiming LLMs will never live up to the hype.
If you want to focus on what AI agents are actually capable of today, the last person I'd pay any attention to is Marcus, who has been wrong about nearly everything related to AI for years, and does nothing but double down.
Did you read the article? Gary Marcus has more than just one take: this is about politics and coercion, not whether LLMs can become AGI
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.
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.
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).
Lol. Gary Marcus is a clown and has some weird complex about how AI ought to work. He said the same in 2022 and bet $100k that AI won't be able to do a lot of things by 2029. It's 2 years later and today's multimodal models can do most on his list.
Gary Marcus is just a guy whose job it is to say AI doesn't work, regardless of whether or not is actually is working in any particular situation.
(Ed Zitron is another such guy, except Ed doesn't actually know anything about AI and refuses to learn anything either.)
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.
> Gary Marcus always, always says AI doesn't actually work - it's his whole thing. If he's posted a correct argument it's a coincidence.
I guess that's fair enough, he does sort of serve a meaningful position in the ecosystem, same as Gary Marcus. I just get tired of the smug outrage that seems to almost get him off.
I've come around to the opinion that he's a bad faith actor riding the anti-AI attention train. Everything that he has said has also been said by other, more reasonable people. To give a concrete example: for years Yann LeCun has been banging the drum that LLMs by themselves are insufficient to build general intelligence and that just scaling up will not be enough.
At some point I entertained a few discussions where Gary Marcus was participating but from what I remember, it would never go anywhere other than a focus on playing around with definitions. Even if he's not wrong about some of his claims, I think there are better people worth engaging with. The amount of insight to be gained from listening to Gary Marcus is akin to that of a small puddle.
He's a Gary Marcus-level contrarian with none of the credentials or contributions to the industry. The "AI bubble" cope narrative is getting stale but will still appeal to luddite autists years after it has ceased to be relevant.
To be fair, Gary Marcus pioneered the "LLMs will never make it" genre of complaining. Everyone else is derivative [1]. Let the man have his victory lap. He's been losing arguments for 5 years straight at this point.
[1] Due credit to Yann for his 'LLMs will stop scaling, energy based methods are the way forward' obsession.
> He spends 95% of his energy trying to take down the merits of NN-based approaches.
The 95% figure comes from where? (I don't think the commenter above has a basis for it.)
How often does Marcus-the-writer take aim at NN-based approaches? Does he get this specific?
I often see Gary Marcus highlighting some examples where generative AI technologies are not as impressive as some people claim. I can't recall him doing the opposite.
Neither can I recall a time when Marcus specifically explained why certain architectures are {inappropriate or irredeemable} either {in general or in particular}.
Have I missed some writing where Marcus lays out a compelling multi-sided evaluation of AI systems or companies? I doubt it. But, please, if he has, let me know.
Marcus knows how to cherry-pick failure. I'm not looking for a writer who has staked out one side of the arguments. Selection bias is on full display. It is really painful to read, because it seems like he would have the mental horsepower to not fall into these traps. Does he not have enough self-awareness nor intellectual honesty to write thoughtfully? Or is this purely a self-interested optimization -- he wants to build an audience, and the One-Sided Argument Pattern works well for him.
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.
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).
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.
Poor Marc, such a victim of his own success. I’ve seen him speak live, and it was clear from listening to him that he was very out of touch with reality. He was insightful on technology, and he definitely had a good understanding of business, but I had a feeling this was somebody who did great things long ago and has been coasting on their reputation and their money ever since. I wonder if in his personal life anyone ever tells him he's wrong or pushes back on him.
> Still, it’s impossible for me to shake the feeling that [Gary Marcus] just likes to hear himself talk and doesn’t want to see progress in AI.
He says he wants to see progress in AI. He wants people to get their heads out of the neural network cul-de-sac and use other tools, too. His quote:
"Imagine a world in which iron makers shouted “iron,” and carbon lovers shouted “carbon,” and nobody ever thought to combine the two [to make steel]; that’s much of what the history of modern artificial intelligence is like." [1]
An adjustment will happen when the limitations of these purely statistical methods play out and burn a few self-driving car investors. Unfortunately, it will also probably taint the entire field of AI and start another AI winter for a decade or so.
[1] https://nautil.us/deep-learning-is-hitting-a-wall-238440/
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