Gary Marcus

“Marcus, G articles @{{w|arXiv}}.org”

“Gary Marcus articles @Medium.com”

“The choices that we make now about AI will have lasting effects, possibly for decades, even for centuries. We've got to get this right now and build an AI that works for us!”

“If anyone wants to teach me about {{w|grassroots}} action, I'm very much all ears right now.”

“[W]hat... we need... is something like a {{w|CERN}} for AI, where we have a global project where people work together to make a {{w|public good}}, a form of AI that everybody can use, that perhaps combines the two systems... It is not driven by commercial imperatives like "Let's get all the data and surveil people," but instead is motivated by trying to make AI that is good for medicine.., for neuroscience... [etc.]”

“A few companies own System 1.., they own the technology and the GPUs to run it... [etc.,] but it's not too late to develop a new approach to AI that can be a {{w|public good}}, working in the {{w|public interest}}.”

“[I]f we can figure out how to build an AI that combines the best of both worlds, we can create an AI that's learnable, data efficient, interpretable, reliable, verifiable and grounded in facts, and one that's capable of reasoning about human values, like don't discriminate against people, or don't harm people, which current AI just can't do.”

“AI has been trying for a long time to make do with one or the other with poor results, and that's a fact about sociology and money. There have been two traditions for... 60 some years, and people in the academy... fight over money, and graduate students, and prestige... [T]hese two fields have been fighting for all of those things for so long that they've forgotten that maybe that's not the right thing to do.”

“[H]ere's the trick. The human combines both. That's what Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow was about. We use both systems. We don't always use them perfectly, but we... balance those... It's kind of a checks and balance that allows us to get through life reasonably well. ...I wrote a book ...Kluge which is about all the times it fails. We're not perfect. We're kind of a low bar, but could do better... [W]e do combine both, and that allows us to get along in the world, to solve new problems we haven't seen before.”

“We just don't know how to make large scale AI. We don't know how to make driverless cars that work. We don't know how to systems that really read with comprehension. There are things we can do, like we make navigation systems work pretty well... [etc.] But AI is basically an unsolved problem, no matter what the Sam Altmans of the world might want you to think.”

“They're almost complimentary, but neither approach has ever worked on its own. ...People used to complain that symbolic AI was brittle. You would give it a slight variation on a question and it would break. That's true of the new neural network approach, the {{w|generative AI}} approach.”

“{{w|Generative AI}} is really good at learning. It's pretty poor at reasoning. You can't really count on it. It's data hungry. It needs... the entire internet. It's uninterpretable... [i.e.,] it's a {{w|black box}}. We don't know what it does. It's prone to hallucinations... On the positive side it's scalable. You can just make it better and better to some point... by adding more data without doing a lot of hard work, and that's very appealing. ...[I]t's grounded in the use of language rather than reality, which... is problematic.”

“[B]etter AI is... possible. ...I am skeptical of things that aren't true. ...I'm a scientist. I spent a quarter century being a scientist before I moved full time into AI. ...I ...want AI to succeed. That's why I built a couple of AI companies. That's why I've studied it since I was 8 years old. To get there... we're going to need to take some clues... from the human mind. We have a field... where people who are good at... matrix math have dominated, and... ignored everything else.”

“It could... be that even though {{w|OpenAI}} looks... invincible... that they aren't really. ...Apple was the last to smartphones.., Google was later in the search engine space. I wouldn't assume either that OpenAI... or that large language models are going to win this race.”

“They're talking about things like synthesizing data. Well I heard that with driverless cars for years. It still hasn't made driverless cars that we can trust.”

“Driverless cars are hard... [e.g.,] the company Cruise had more people in teleoperations centers than... cars on the road, which should remind you of the Wizard of Oz, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"... [I]t might remind you of some other stories where people tried to fake it till they make it...”

“Sam Altman was fired and everybody started talking about this algorithm Q... Ilya Sutskever had seen it and it was going to change the world. I don't that's actually gone anywhere yet.”

“...Elon Musk ...keeps playing the hype card with driverless cars. It... goes back to Google even earlier, but Musk said... we would have driverless Teslas that would drive from LA to New York City by 2017. ...[I] still hasn't happened. He promised a fleet of a million {{w|robotaxi}}s by 2020. It hasn't happened. He promised that... he would mass produce them by 2024. It hasn't happened. But it always drives the stock price up, so we get a misleading representation of what's actually possible.”

“Building a foreign policy, or building our AI policy around fantasy is not a good idea, but what Silicon Valley has learned is if they hype stuff, the stock goes up... [T]hey've learned this over and over and over.”

“As we develop AI policy we need to be realistic about the limits of current AI... [i.e.,] we have to know what's going on... [S]ometimes I feel like the people making the rules are seduced by the companies... [e.g.,] the {{w|Chip War}}... the U.S. is withholding chips from China. ...This could lead to military conflict ...and it's all predicated on the idea that if China got {{w|GPT-5}} first it would be a really big deal. ...[W]hat would they do with it? Write more boilerplate rough draft text faster than we can..? This is not going to war over!”