“what do you think of gary marcus?”
Summary of results
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."
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).
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.
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.
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”.
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 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.
>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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Gary Marcus isn't about "getting real", it's making a name for himself as a contrarian to the popular AI narrative.
This article may seem reasonable, but here he's defending a paper that in his previous article he called "A knockout blow for LLMs".
Many of his articles seem reasonable (if a bit off) until you read a couple dozen a spot a trend.
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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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?
The author seems to be more about self-promotion.
From the article: "that many online dubbed it “Gary Marcus Day” for proving your consistent criticism", "Even my anti-fan club (“Gary haters” in modern parlance)", "Tweets like “The saddest thing in my day is that @garymarcus is right”", and his bio - "known as a leading voice in AI".
Looping over his articles, I don't see anything interesting.
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.
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.
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...
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.
>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 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.
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
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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."
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
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.
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've been watching Gary Marcus on BSky — seemingly finding anything to substantiate his loathing of LLMs. I wish he were less biased. To paraphrase Brian Eno, whatever shade yo want to throw at AI, 6 months from now they're going to cast it off and you'll have to find new shade to throw.
Having said that, I would be thankful if scaling has hit a wall. Scaling seems to me like the opposite of innovation.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Marcus’s schtick is going on about things like "knockout blows, and LLM uselessness". He's kind of the go to AI/LLM naysayer.
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
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 last paragraph is my own thoughts. The one is before is Gemini.
Btw I didn't agree with Gemini at all :) I just thought it gave a pretty good summary of Gary Marcus's points.
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.
What's exactly wrong with Gary's economics?
I'd say he does bring pretty convincing arguments to the table and his logic does make sense.
if you take all the wealth and give it one group of people who don't put it back into the circulation but rather just invest it, it makes sense that there's no resources left for anyone else and "everyone" else is comparatively poor.
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.
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[a] In the words of Geoff Hinton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7ltNiRrDHQ
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Note: At the moment, the OP is flagged. To the mods: It shouldn't be, because it conforms to the HN guidelines.
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
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.
The AI community requires more independent experts like Marcus to maintain integrity and transparency, ensuring that the field does not succumb to hyperbole as well as shifting standards such as "internally achieved AGI", etc.
Regardless of personal opinions about his style, Marcus has been proven correct on several fronts, including the diminishing returns of scaling laws and the lack of true reasoning (out of distribution generalizability) in LLM-type AI.
These are issues that the industry initially denied, only to (years) later acknowledge them as their "own recent discoveries" as soon as they had something new to sell (chain-of-thought approach, RL-based LLM, tbc.).
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.
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.
Anyone with an opinion can be labelled biased. Also I’m not clear what you mean by Marcus “riding the anti AI wave” but infer that you mean it negatively. He has been writing informed criticism for several years and about cognitive psychology for considerably longer.
I know very little about economics so I can only parrot what I've heard from others but the consensus from everyone I've personally heard talk about Gary - not just Abundists - is that he's a crank when it comes to economics.
Gary is great laying it out for the layman but he talks as if he "thought" it all up. It's really Thomas Piketty who pointed out the issue way before Gary.
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.