[AbrahamParangi]

It is worth noting that Gary Marcus has been declaring the newfound futility of AI every couple months for the last 2-3 years or so.

Meanwhile, the technology continues to progress. The level of psychological self-defense is unironically more interesting than what he has to say.

Quite a wide variety of people find AI deeply ego threatening to the point of being brainwormed into spouting absolute nonsense, but why?

[ACCount37]

"AI effect" is long known and pretty well documented.

When AI beat humans at chess, it didn't result in humans revising their idea of the capabilities of machine intelligence upwards. It resulted in humans revising their notion of how much intelligence is required to play chess at world champion level downwards, and by a lot.

Clearly, there's some sort of psychological defense mechanism in play. First, we see "AI could never do X". Then an AI does X, and the sentiment flips to "X has never required any intelligence in the first place".

[goalieca]

I think it’s fairly safe to say that chess can be modelled as a math problem and does not require _general_ intelligence to solve.

[ACCount37]

I think it's fairly safe to say that "X can be modeled as a math problem and does not require _general_ intelligence to solve" for any X that general intelligence can solve. Some math problems are just more complicated than others.

[tim333]

It goes back further. Here he is in 2012:

>Norvig is clearly very interested in seeing what Hinton could come up with. But even Norvig didn’t see how you could build a machine that could understand stories using deep learning alone. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/is-deep-learning-a-...

[sailingparrot]

> Quite a wide variety of people find AI deeply ego threatening to the point of being brainwormed into spouting absolute nonsense, but why?

He is not brainwashed, this just happens to be his business. What happens to Gary Marcus if Gary Marcus stops talking about how LLM are worthless? He just disappears. No one ever interviews him for his general thoughts on ML, or to discuss his (nonexistent) research. His only clame to fame is being the loudest contrarian person in the LLM world so he has to keep doing that or accept to become irrelevant.

Slight tangent but this is a recurring pattern in fringe belief, e.g. prominent flat earther who long ago accepted earth is not flat but can’t stop the act as all their friends and incomes are tied to that belief.

Not to say that believing LLM won’t lead to AGI is fringe, but it does show the danger (and benefits I guess) to tying your entire identity to a specific belief.

[ModernMech]

> Quite a wide variety of people find AI deeply ego threatening to the point of being brainwormed into spouting absolute nonsense, but why?

It makes sense when you look at this as a wider conversation. Every time Sam Altman, Elon Musk and co. predict that AGI is just around the corner, and their products will be smarter than all of humanity combined, and they are like having an expert in everything in your pocket; people like Gary Marcus are going to respond in just as extreme way in the opposite direction. Maybe if the AI billionaires with the planet-wide megaphones weren't so bombastic about their claims, certain other people wouldn't be so bombastic in their pushback.

[brazukadev]

> Meanwhile, the technology continues to progress

And at the same time, his predictions are becoming more and more real

[lairv]

https://nautil.us/deep-learning-is-hitting-a-wall-238440/

Gary Marcus said that Deep Learning was hitting a wall 1 month before the release of DALLE 2, 6 months before the release of ChatGPT and 1 year before GPT4, arguably 3 of the biggest milestones in Deep Learning

[brazukadev]

Sam Altman said GPT-3 was dangerous and openai should be responsible for saving the humanity.

[CamperBob2]

Worth pointing out that no one who doesn't work at a frontier lab has ever seen a completely un-nerfed, un-bowdlerized AI model.

[ACCount37]

There are some base models available to the public today. Not on "end of 2025 frontier run" scale, but a few of them are definitely larger and better than GPT-3. There are some uses for things like that.

Not that the limits of GPT-3 were well understood at the time.

We really had no good grasp of how dangerous or safe something like that would - and whether there are some subtle tipping point that could propel something like GPT-3 all the way to AGI and beyond.

Knowing what we know now? Yeah, they could have released GPT-3 base model and nothing bad would have happened. But they didn't know that back then.

[brazukadev]

But we know that ChatGPT 5 is better than anything un-nerfed, un-bowdlerized from 2 years ago. And is not impressive.