Pundit ClaimsAI claims by Gary Marcus and Ed Zitron, with the evidence

Unresolved claims by Gary Marcus, page 1 of 11

Deadlines are judged as of 2026-10-29. About Gary Marcus and the sources covered.

Unresolved claims by Gary Marcus (1005)

The record was checked, and the evidence available by the cutoff does not settle it. Forecasts whose deadline has not arrived are listed apart, as not yet due.

Page 1 of 11: claims 1 to 100 of 1005, ordered by the date first said, newest first. To find a claim by its words, use search.

  1. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “And the effects of all that IP theft on artists and writers, and potential negative effects more broadly across the employment market (though, mercifully, these have been more modest than some people expected).”

  2. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Although it is unreliable and prone to hallucinations, it is terrific at making plausible sounding text (e.g., phishing attacks to trick people into revealing credentials) and deepfaked videos at virtually zero cost, allowing attackers to broaden their attacks.”

  3. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “The Trump administration will do little to hold them responsible.”

  4. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “A lot of the discussion on social media has been reduced to an ignorant cheering section that applauds without knowing what it is applauding or what it might mean— without ever asking basic scientific questions.”

  5. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “As a result, we have zero idea of how generalizable the result is outside math.”

  6. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Already, the advent of general purpose agents with broad internet access has led to tens of thousands of hacking incidents”

  7. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “But the US Senate did nothing.”

  8. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Greedy company makes bad choice that causes chaos; government does nothing to stop them.”

  9. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “The board might want to consider its liability, since they have done nothing constructive to address OpenAI’s security meltdown.”

  10. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “If he keeps sticking to that line, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Huang’s own reputation will rapidly diminish.”

  11. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “He has consistently favored OpenAI over Anthropic (a company that doesn’t seem to be quite so deeply in over its head).”

  12. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “And he has done absolutely nothing (or at least nothing public) to sanction or investigate OpenAI, even after its repeated attacks on foreign governments, companies and universities and who knows what else.”

  13. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Once again OpenAI and told nobody for months.”

  14. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “And so far the White House has done nothing.”

  15. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Pretty much everyone converged on exactly the same things I keep harping on:”

  16. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “What we are facing near-term, anyway, is not extinction. And it’s not superintelligence… It’s wholesale deepfaked disinformation, and unreliable but persistent AI systems stealing credentials and launching cyberattacks, at scale.”

  17. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “We should expect that malicious actors will try use current AI to undermine financial systems and other vital infrastructure such as trains or electrical systems.”

  18. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “⚠️ Microsoft and OpenAI have only one play to make GenAI profitable, and this is it: all out 24x7 surveillance.”

  19. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “The mood has changed, and this time a whole pile of people pushed back.”

  20. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “That means you can run them (or “posttrain” them), but, crucially, users can’t customize or improve them to remotely the same degree (more about that in a second), and outsiders can’t investigate them to nearly the same degree.”

  21. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Open-weight piggybacks onto all the great press that open-source has but offers few of the advantages. Open-weight models are NOT fully customizable, and not transparent.”

  22. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “It means that developers often can’t really use the open-weight models (despite the hype) to develop what they want; scientists can’t use them to test a lot of key hypotheses, and regulators can’t peer inside the process.”

  23. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Only a small number of companies (Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, maybe a few in China) can match on sheer compute and expertise building distributed systems.”

  24. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Google still makes a ton of money, $402 billion in revenue last year, $132 billion in profit), and has vastly more cash to play with than OpenAI and Anthropic.”

  25. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Google’s most obvious competitors have troubles of their own. OpenAI has a declining reputation, Anthropic has conflict with the administration, Microsoft and Amazon don’t have the same talent pool.”

  26. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Google can probably keep going even if it doesn’t take much of the LLM market in the end (which I expect will be a multi-way tie with relatively modest profits).”

  27. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Google still has access to an enormous amount of data, from search and email especially, at a scale that nobody else has.”

  28. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “He has worked together with his replacement, Koray Kavukcuoglu, for over a decade, and they will continue to work together.”

  29. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “The surgery prediction, too, will surely be repackaged with a new date, at a later date.”

  30. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Elon’s timeline predictions are notoriously, and to my mind, obviously, bad, yet all too often reported as gospel.”

  31. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “The kind of math OpenAI is dealing with here is radically different from many (perhaps most) real-world problems in which verification neither guarantees solutions nor allows one to produce infinite training data effectively for free.”

  32. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “The “AGI-is-near” community keeps committing the same logical fallacy over and over.”

  33. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “OpenAI can do what Astra does in math because math allows for external tools to do verification and to create synthetic data.”

  34. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “OpenAI was driven by competition to drop its prices by 80%.”

  35. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “From a technical perspective, this is what happens when you let pattern0matching machines with no real comprehension of what they are doing freely roam the internet.”

  36. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “A lot of people have come around to that view:”

  37. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Nor have we reached a moment in “which technological growth accelerates beyond human control””

  38. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Brain-computer interfaces will surely improve greatly (though it may take many decades or even centuries to get where Kurzweil dreams of).”

  39. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “The market isn’t reading the latest potential Nvidia-OpenAI deal as good news; they are reading it as desperation.”

  40. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Certainly it would slow down progress and raise prices, helping two US companies at the expense of hundreds of thousands of others.”

  41. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “that the lack of a technical moat would mean that companies like OpenAI would remain unprofitable.”

  42. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “That’s basically what has happened.”

  43. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Second, because the systems are not reliable, charging premium prices was never really viable in the long term.”

  44. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Third, the basic approach is easily replicated, leading to the price war dynamics and small or negative margins.”

  45. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “As I have said before, over and over, LLMs are becoming a commodity.”

  46. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “With the decline of tokenmaxxing, the rise of Chinese models, and the U.S. government pause on Fable, June was not as kind to Anthropic as April and May were.”

  47. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “In my view, the world has indeed gone in this direction. LLMs have become commodities, prices wars have been significant, profits for the LLM providers have been elusive.”

  48. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “In my view, the world has indeed gone in this direction. LLMs have become commodities, prices wars have been significant, profits for the LLM providers have been elusive.”

  49. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “There is no doubt in my mind that a lot of things in AI are overvalued, but that doesn’t mean they will deflate at all once.”

  50. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “and most of them are down significantly for the month:”

  51. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “But on the whole, Generative AI has not been delivering great gains. We have seen that now in study after study, MIT, McKinsey, Bain, and many more.”

  52. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “I really do think that Claude Code (which remember, is a special-purpose neurosymbolic system rather than a generic chatbot) will increase productivity for coders (if technical debt doesn’t swallow back those gains).”

  53. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “You can’t multiply your losses every year by 8x (or even close) for very long.”

  54. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Thue rushed and seemingly unprincipled decision will leave the rest of the world rushing towards “sovereign AI” (made for example by European or Canadian companies) and even Chinese AI, rather than deal with the uncertainty in the US”

  55. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “At this point, there is no turning back. Governments going forward will have to consider which deployments are unsafe, and block those that are.”

  56. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “And, of course, all of these risks were foreseeable.”

  57. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “To be sure, Anthropic brought this on themselves to a considerable degree, by (a) overselling doom and their own wares and (b) by literally and repeatedly calling for export controls themselves.”

  58. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Because essentially all their software has a tendency to fabricate fairly regularly and even defame people and to sometimes give bad medical information, and so on.”

  59. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “If American courts were to rule similarly, or if Congress made that the law of the land, all the LLM providers would be in deep, deep trouble.”

  60. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “And so at some point, I think OpenAI is gonna have a problem where they can’t really meet their obligations.”

  61. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “First of all, domino one: tokenmaxxing has indeed clearly died, just as Eisman and I had anticipated a few weeks ago.”

  62. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “If they can’t meet their obligations, I expect Nvidia and Oracle and many others would take a big hit as collateral damage (Domino 5).”

  63. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Two years later, competitors have caught up. OpenAI has had to cut prices.”

  64. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Open AI, I think, has a problem right now. They are burning money the fastest.”

  65. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “That is absolutely not going to happen.”

  66. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “And then you have slop inundating Wikipedia, libraries and so on.”

  67. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Moreover, especially in agentic coding, there are massive losses, up and down the food chain.”

  68. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “The one possible major productivity story (coding) also happens to be the one burning the most cash.”

  69. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Again there is no reason to think that any of it has added to the GDP or quality of science or music.”

  70. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “AI generates a lot of output (which fits many people’s informal notion of productivity), but it hasn’t yielded much in the way of RoI for many companies (per studies from MIT, McKinsey, Bain, and many others), and hasn’t materially changed GDP.”

  71. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “As I noted on X, nobody is going to trust an American AI company that is partly owned by the US Government.”

  72. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Coming soon: more on why AI has had less impact on real-world productivity so far than many people had anticipated.”

  73. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “None of that is particularly great for Nvidia, CoreWeave, Oracle, Nebius, Micron, and a variety of other hardware and semiconductor providers”

  74. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Rather, they want to (and will) rush ahead, hinting at “least cautious actors” for justification.”

  75. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “AGI: machine can do anything human can do, autonomously. That has not achieved]”

  76. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Getting to AGI will require new ideas, not just new code optimizations.”

  77. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “If there is no moat, nobody is going to take 90% of the market.”

  78. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “And companies like Anthropic are ending their all you can eat buffet, which will make many customers think twice.”

  79. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Same will happen with Anthropic and OpenAI.”

  80. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “With no clear winners, nobody can charge monopoly prices; instead, you get price wars and commodity pricing.”

  81. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “But everybody is building essentially the same technical solution with essentially the same data, so there is no moat.”

  82. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “They are creating interactive fiction that is trained to predict the language of actual beings.”

  83. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Within hours of when I posted yesterday’s essay on the decline of tokenmaxxing, I saw further converging evidence, such as this:”

  84. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Consistent with the Axios quote, and the Uber concern’s I expressed a couple days ago, I am seeing more and more reports online like this:”

  85. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “One big reason why Anthropic is having a blowout quarter (aside from the massive one time subsidy that they got from SpaceX) is that companies have been “tokenmaxxing” for the last few months, encouraging employees to use GenAI as much possible, without much regard to payoff.”

  86. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “That means lots of short-term revenue to Anthropic and OpenAI, but it never seemed like a sustainable idea to me:”

  87. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “which means less revenue for Anthropic and others. Or lower prices and even more challenges in being profitable.”

  88. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “In which cases those stocks will eventually fall.”

  89. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Three companies that have not yet shown themselves to be profitable are expected to soon IPO for a total of something like four trillion dollars.”

  90. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Every time I think about the numbers and lack of RoI for most pilot studies and the reliability problems I think so.”

  91. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Babies don’t keep doubling forever, and nor will AI progress.”

  92. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “We can be absolutely sure that the task length “time horizon” for AI is not going to keep doubling until “time horizons will be 580 times the age of the universe” as Lisan al-Ghaib joked.”

  93. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Practically every day I see new signs that the backlash against AI is growing.”

  94. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Some of this is technical (LLMs aren’t reliable), some of it is political/economic (such as the utter lack of responsible regulation).”

  95. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “GenAI has been undermining secondary and college education, opening up mass surveillance, increasing disinformation, delusions, impersonation, phishing, and other forms of cybercrime, nonconsensual deep fake porn, bias in employment and other domains, and economic disparity, drowning the world in slop and unwanted, over-leveraged environment-damaging data centers that risk causing a recession.”

  96. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “If the trial is cast as a referendum on Musk, rather than on OpenAI’s founders, he will lose.”

  97. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “And I am sure we will see many more catastrophic failures soon enough, involving things like privacy, security and data loss. Already there have been many.”

  98. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Here is a further example of my last point that ChatGPT’s exciting new image system has trouble with functional understanding, sent to me by a reader:”

  99. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “But if you look closely, there are several errors, and those errors are revealing.”

  100. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “But anybody knowledgeable about bikes (racers, mechanics, designers etc) would immediately see numerous problems.”