“We still don’t have anything like stable or trustworthy solutions for common sense, reasoning, language, or analogy. Truth is, I have been using this same pie chart for about 5 years, and the situation has scarcely changed.”
Our reading, the sentence that was checked:
AI has no stable or trustworthy solutions for common sense, reasoning, language or analogy, and this has scarcely changed in about five years.
Assessment: Unresolved Evidence as of
Where and when Gary Marcus wrote it
Marcus on AI, Dear Elon Musk, here are five things you might want to consider about AGI, paragraph 21.
- Said
- Source observed
- live page, full text, public
- Evidence as of
- the cutoff for this assessment
- Assessment recorded
- assessment marcus-dear-elon-musk-here-are-five-things-536f05-a1
We recorded 21 claims from this post. See every claim from this post.
The wording above is the version this site observed on 2026-10-28. The source may have been edited after 2022-05-31. This page does not claim the wording was captured then.
What the claim commits to
- Kind
- Observation
- Deadline, as the speaker wrote it
- None stated. This site does not add one.
- Deadline state when assessed
- No horizon
- Deadline state on 2026-10-29
- No horizon (the release’s reference date)
From the speaker
- stable or trustworthy solutions
- common sense, reasoning, language, or analogy
- about 5 years
- the situation has scarcely changed
Our interpretation
- A trustworthy solution means dependable performance across varied, unfamiliar instances of a domain, rather than success on one benchmark. It does not require perfect performance.
- The comparison covers approximately 2017 through May 2022. Calendar 2017 is the approximate baseline; the endpoint is the post date.
- In context, 'scarcely changed' concerns the availability of dependable general solutions. It does not necessarily deny substantial improvements in benchmark scores.
Counts as supported if: Contemporary evaluations show persistent, substantial reliability limitations across the four domains, and comparable longitudinal evidence shows little change in the availability of dependable general solutions.
Counts as contradicted if: A dependable general solution existed in a named domain by May 2022, or comparable evaluations demonstrate substantial improvement in broad reliability since approximately 2017.
Retrospective: these criteria were written after the outcome was public.
Current assessment
Was it true for the period described?
Outcome: Unresolved
The record was checked, and the evidence available by the cutoff does not settle it.
Scored on a plain reading. The speaker named no measure for this claim, so it was judged on the reading an informed reader would take, stated below under our interpretation. Both reviews had to find that reading fair.
- Evidence as of
- Deadline state when assessed
- No horizon
- Assessment recorded
- Policy version
- 2026-10-28.7
Rationale
Contemporary research supports persistent weaknesses in language, commonsense reasoning and analogy. PaLM also documents substantial benchmark progress before the post. Those findings can coexist: improved scores do not establish trustworthy general solutions. The evidence does not settle the combined claim that dependable solutions were absent across all four domains and that this situation had scarcely changed over five years.
Limitations
- The studies use different tasks, models and evaluation methods.
- Scoring the claim as mixed solely because benchmark scores improved would substitute a different meaning of progress.
Evidence (4 items)
Supports the claim: arXiv; Robin Jia and Percy Liang,
perform poorly under adversarial evaluation.
Why it matters here: The experiments establish substantial reading-comprehension brittleness near the five-year baseline. They do not measure subsequent improvement.
- Publisher
- arXiv; Robin Jia and Percy Liang
- Kind of source
- Preprint, not peer reviewed
- Describes events of
- Public from
Supports the claim: arXiv; Asahi Ushio and colleagues,
word embedding models.
Why it matters here: The study reports difficulty with abstract analogies and sensitivity to architecture and settings. This supports a limited finding of unreliable analogy performance among the tested models, not the absence of every possible solution in May 2022.
- Where
- Abstract
- Publisher
- arXiv; Asahi Ushio and colleagues
- Kind of source
- Preprint, not peer reviewed
- Describes events of
- Public from
Supports the claim: arXiv; Prajjwal Bhargava and Vincent Ng,
partially understood
Why it matters here: This contemporary survey identifies unaddressed commonsense capabilities and weaknesses in existing evaluations. It supports continued incompleteness but supplies no common five-year measure of reliability.
- Publisher
- arXiv; Prajjwal Bhargava and Vincent Ng
- Kind of source
- Preprint, not peer reviewed
- Describes events of
- Public from
Context only: arXiv; Aakanksha Chowdhery and colleagues,
language understanding and generation benchmarks.
Why it matters here: PaLM supplies material counterevidence to a reading that little capability progress occurred. These benchmark gains do not by themselves establish dependable general solutions under the contract.
- Where
- Abstract
- Publisher
- arXiv; Aakanksha Chowdhery and colleagues
- Kind of source
- Preprint, not peer reviewed
- Describes events of
- Public from
What would settle it
Comparable historical robustness evaluations across the four domains, together with a defensible threshold for dependable performance and meaningful five-year change.
Where it was said (1)
Said once in the sources this register covers.
: Marcus on AI, Dear Elon Musk, here are five things you might want to consider about AGI
We still don’t have anything like stable or trustworthy solutions for common sense, reasoning, language, or analogy. Truth is, I have been using this same pie chart for about 5 years, and the situation has scarcely changed.
- Where
- paragraph 21
- Published
- 2022-05-31
- Source observed
- , live page
- Access
- full text, public
History
Assessment versions
- Assessment marcus-dear-elon-musk-here-are-five-things-536f05-a1: Current. Outcome: Unresolved. Evidence as of 2026-10-28. Public date not recorded.
Recorded events
Assessment publishedBy this site
First assessment published after both reviews and the final-text check passed.
About assessment marcus-dear-elon-musk-here-are-five-things-536f05-a1.