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

Unresolved claims, page 12 of 20

Claims by Gary Marcus and Ed Zitron. Deadlines are judged as of 2026-10-29.

Unresolved claims (1958)

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 12 of 20: claims 1101 to 1200 of 1958, ordered by the date first said, newest first. To find a claim by its words, use search.

  1. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “And they don’t magically resolve the challenges of maintaining complex code bases over time.”

  2. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “The idea that coders (and more generally, software architects) are on their way out is absurd.”

  3. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “A few days ago he triumphantly claimed (without evidence) that nearly all code would be written by AI within the next year:”

  4. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “That is not going to magically change next year, at a time when AI still can’t reliably solving river-crossing problems.”

  5. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Nobel-calibre science requires sound logic, reliable causal reasoning, and originality, and none of those are firmly in the grasp of current AI.”

  6. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “• AGI should have a reliable ability to understand complex syntactic and semantic structure. (Failings here are also often reflected in quirky errors.”

  7. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Especially when we just saw GPT-5 (ultimately relabeled as GPT 4.5) fail despite more than two years of hard and expensive work.”

  8. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “But it is not just that I think Klein is wrong, or that he did a disservice to the other side of the argument, but that words like his are motivating a lot of dodgy bets being placed on the imminent AGI assumption — in ways that may not make sense.”

  9. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “What that means is that a quarter century has passed without a principled solution to even one of those problems.”

  10. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “(My view, as I explained in Taming Silicon Valley, is that industry has a vested interest in making people believe that AGI is imminent — how else to justify the lavish valuations - and that they have fooled a lot of people in government who aren’t technical experts into believing that AGI is closer than it really is).”

  11. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “The fact that Grok 3 was 15x the size of Grok 2, and also generally viewed as disappointing.”

  12. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “The fact that GPT 4.5 received very mixed reviews — despite years of labor and billions investment — and could in no reasonable way be considered a major (rather than minor, incremental) step forwards towards AGI.”

  13. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “And these complex systems, built on the unreliable foundations of LLMs, are going to prove to be massively difficult to debug.”

  14. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “But there’s also no reason to think that any of them are logically insolvable in principle. So we will get there someday.”

  15. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “OpenAI has no path to profitability, guaranteeing it will need more cash, and right now — at the time when it needs the most it’s ever needed — SoftBank, the only company willing to provide it, has proven that it will have to go to great lengths to do so.”

  16. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Worse still, thanks to this agreement, OpenAI’s future — both in its ability to expand its infrastructure (which appears to be entirely contingent on the construction of Stargate) and its ability to raise funding — is entirely dependent on SoftBank, which in turn must borrow money to fund it.”

  17. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “It is time for investors and the general public to begin demanding tangible and direct numbers on the revenue and profits related to generative AI, as it is becoming increasingly obvious that the revenues are small and the profits are non-existent.”

  18. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “SoftBank has committed to over $40 billion of costs that it cannot currently afford, taking on as much as $24 billion in debt in the next year to help sustain one more funding round and the construction of data centers for OpenAI, a company that loses money on literally every single customer.”

  19. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “I can’t imagine that noncoders are really going to get those systems to work well enough for prime time (except perhaps in very very narrow use cases), let alone know what do when the back end internet calls break.”

  20. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “They never let you know that a significant number of real world coders are deeply frustrated with automated coding tools like Cursor.AI (which is in part powered by Anthropic’s Claude):”

  21. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Nine years later and hundreds of startups later, my understanding is that not one radiologist has been replaced, and many parts of the world actually have a shortage of radiologists.”

  22. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “People are increasingly going to discourage American children from learning to code based on naive enthusiasm from people like Roose.”

  23. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “it’s often easy to get a solution that is 80% correct, and extremely difficult to get the last 20%. Driverless cars have been like that for decades.”

  24. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “DeepSeek led to a price war that cuts potential profits.”

  25. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “(And Elon is right that they don’t have all or most of the Stargate funding in hand).”

  26. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Because OpenAI’s burn rate is so high (perhaps on the order of a couple billion dollars a month), they have limited runway, even after last year’s massive financing.”

  27. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Even Altman himself was uncharacteristically tepid in his product announcement.”

  28. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Gary Marcus was right all along that pure scaling would eventually hit a wall, or at least reach a point of massively diminishing returns.”

  29. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Right now, the math for profitability doesn’t work, influence on productivity of GenAI has been minimal, and prospects for pure scaling aren’t looking great.”

  30. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Right now, the math for profitability doesn’t work, influence on productivity of GenAI has been minimal, and prospects for pure scaling aren’t looking great.”

  31. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “It’s not just OpenAI either; it’s the whole field, as I discussed in my own recent Fortune article:”

  32. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “The truth is that scaling just isn’t producing the fruit that it once did.”

  33. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “And for that matter people should be comparing GenAI revenue (on the order of low tens of billions per year, pre price wars) with GenAI expenditures (order half a trillion dollars to date), and doing the math, especially given the price wars induced by DeepSeek.”

  34. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “I personally noticed Musk’s shutting out of opposing views when he stopped answering my emails when I warned him in July – correctly - that throwing in with Trump would undermine the cause of AI safety (which for a decade, until a few weeks ago, seemed extremely important to Musk).”

  35. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “I must repeat that Microsoft will have spent over $200 billion in capital expenditures by the end of 2025.”

  36. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “As a result of the costs of running these services, a free user of ChatGPT is a cost burden on OpenAI, as is every free customer of Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, Perplexity, or any other generative AI company.”

  37. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “And let’s be abundantly clear: OpenAI cannot exist any further without further venture capital investment. This company has absolutely no path to sustain itself, no moat, and loses so much money that it will need more than $50 billion to continue in its current form.”

  38. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “It doesn’t just cost more to run OpenAI than it makes — it costs the company a billion dollars more than the entirety of its revenue to run the software it sells before any other costs.”

  39. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Anthropic, like OpenAI, has no moat.”

  40. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Though Altman has promised that ChatGPT Plus and free users will eventually get access to a few Deep Research queries a month, this will only increase its cash burn further!”

  41. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “These realities — the lack of utility and product differentiation — also mean that OpenAI can’t raise its prices above the breakeven point, which would also likely make its generative AI unaffordable and unattractive to both business and personal customers.”

  42. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “OpenAI also spends an alarming amount of money on salaries — over $700 million in 2024 before you consider stock-based compensation, a number that will also have to increase because it’s “growing” which means “hiring as many people as possible,” and it’s paying through the nose.”

  43. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “OpenAI's products are not fundamentally differentiated or interesting enough to be sold separately. It has failed — as with the rest of the generative AI industry — to meaningfully productize its models due to their massive training and operational costs and a lack of any meaningful "killer app" use cases.”

  44. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Its products do not scale like traditional software, in that the more users it gets, the more expensive its services are to run because its models are so compute-intensive.”

  45. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Yet it isn’t working. Consumers don’t want this shit. They’re intrigued by the idea, then mostly immediately bouncing off of it once they see what it can (or can’t) do.”

  46. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Said costs are also so severe that even paying customers lose these companies money.”

  47. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Nevertheless, OpenAI loses money on every single paying customer, just like with its free users. Increasing paid subscribers also, somehow, increases OpenAI's burn rate. This is not a real company.”

  48. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Large Language Models — which are trained by feeding them massive amounts of training data and then reinforcing their understanding through further training runs — are hitting the point of diminishing returns.”

  49. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Though every single person that visits ChatGPT.com might not become a user, it’s safe to assume that ChatGPT’s Monthly Active Users are somewhere in the region of 500-600 million.”

  50. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “And the reason why OpenAI hasn’t fixed the hallucination problem isn’t because it doesn’t want to, but because it can’t. They’re an inevitable side-effect of LLMs as a whole.”

  51. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.”

  52. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Taking this into account, the fraction of problems where a composite AI system could solve the problem starting with its English language statement is at most 60%.”

  53. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “DeepMind didn’t make that claim, and it isn’t true.”

  54. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Even if one were to glom together the best general AIs with AlphaGeometry2, the combination would fall far short of the geometric understanding and problem solving ability of high school math student with a talent for math.”

  55. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “In short, most of the coverage you read on artificial intelligence is led by companies that benefit financially from you thinking artificial intelligence is important and by default all of this coverage mentions OpenAI or ChatGPT.”

  56. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Furthermore, nothing about this product moves OpenAI toward profitability. In fact, I think they're doing the opposite.”

  57. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Anthropic is currently raising $2 billion at a $60 billion valuation primarily based off of this trumped-up marketing nonsense.”

  58. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “To be clear, OpenAI burned approximately $5 billion on compute alone.”

  59. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “The tech industry — and part of our economy — is accelerating at speed into a brick wall, driven by people like Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Marc Benioff, and Larry Ellison, all men that are incentivized to have you value their companies based on something other than what their businesses actually sell.”

  60. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Deep Research uses OpenAI's o3 model which can cost as much as $1,000 a query, and while I imagine these prompts aren't that expensive, they are still significantly more so than a regular query from ChatGPT.”

  61. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “There is no "artificial intelligence" part of Microsoft's revenue or earnings. This is literally Microsoft taking anything with "AI" on it and saying "we made money!"”

  62. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “And when this all falls apart — and I believe it will — there will be a very public reckoning for the tech industry.”

  63. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “The damage will be tens of thousands of people fired, long-term environmental and infrastructural chaos, and a profound depression in Silicon Valley that I believe will dwarf the dot-com bust.”

  64. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “There isn't a single god damn startup in the history of anything — other than perhaps Facebook — that has had this level of coverage at such an early stage.”

  65. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Over the last couple days I have been asking version 2 to draw images identifying and tagging parts of images. The results are consistently awful:”

  66. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “And it will be the citizens of the United States who bear the consequences, while the guy who stood to get a $400M armored T̶e̶s̶l̶a̶ EV government contract (until the media squawked) stands to collect a big slice of the profits, unemploying thousands of lifelong government employees.”

  67. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Yet Musk wants to use shove problematic AI, both biased and unreliable, down our throats, immediately, as reported by The New York Times, and noted in this Bluesky comment:”

  68. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Soon such unreliable stuff, with butt-covering warning messages that most people will ignore, will be everywhere.”

  69. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “For nearly three years I have been saying that the pure scaling of LLMs – adding more data and more parameters – would eventually run out, and that it would fail to solve hallucinations and boneheaded errors and that scaling laws were merely empirical generalizations, rather than physical laws.”

  70. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “They were overhyping LLMS as AGI, even as problems like hallucinations and boneheaded persisted.”

  71. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “(Also, having our own massive LLMs will do nothing to stop China from using theirs in authoritarian pursuits.)”

  72. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “It only caught fire because the media insisted it did so.”

  73. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “LLMs, once novel, are largely a commodity.”

  74. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “(Note that test-time compute systems are not across the board improvements like GPT-4 was relative to GPT-3 or GPT-3 was relative to GPT-2, but rather improvements in certain domains such as coding and math.)”

  75. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “A key claim of the paper was that pure scaling of LLMs – just adding more data and compute to extant LLM architectures – would not bring us to AGI, and that so-called scaling laws were merely empirical generalizations rather than physical laws.”

  76. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “What changed here was the AI landscape. It’s all about money, of course.”

  77. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “If they were already making zillions from AI, they would have mentioned that on the investor call. But presumably they are not, and that cannot continue indefinitely.”

  78. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Google has to find a way to make back the money back. Bye bye corporate motto, hello military and surveillance.”

  79. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Reading between the lines, Google is locked in a epic arms race for AI supremacy that is not so far paying off.”

  80. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “failed, multiple times, to include a full list of all US states”

  81. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “issued numerous corrections that were wrong, never acknowledging uncertainty until after its errors were called out.”

  82. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “failed, multiple times, to properly count to 50”

  83. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “reported that the letter h could be a vowel, at least when it appeared in the word Northwest”

  84. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “We can be sure that DeepResearch will get heavily used.”

  85. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Deep Research, because it works faster and expands the reach of what can be automatically generated, is going to make that problem worse.”

  86. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Unfortunately, virtually everything that Deep Research produces will pass a LGTM test ( “it ‘looks good to me’”); people will assume it’s legit, even when it is isn’t.”

  87. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “The output of DeepResearch will inevitably feed further models; we will wind up with more of this:”

  88. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Few people will fact-check its output carefully, since it will all superficially look ok.”

  89. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Scammers will use it, for example, to write “medical reports” that are half-baked (in order to sell ads on the webistes that report such “research”).”

  90. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Because Deep Research lowers the effort, making it trivial to write legit-sounding articles, paper mill factories (there is already such a thing, designed to game citation counts, “an illegitimate, yet lucrative business“ that is growing) will massively ramp up production, choking the peer review process and saturating the market with hard-to-find, hard-to-rectify errors.”

  91. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “And it’s not just the models that will be infected, but the scientific literature itself.”

  92. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “When — not if — Deep Research begins to flood the medical zone with shite, we are all in trouble.”

  93. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Right now, I do not believe that there are companies that are stymied by the pricing that OpenAI and their ilk offer, nor do I think there are many companies or use cases that don’t exist because Large Language Models are too expensive.”

  94. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “He ended with “look forward to bringing you all AGI and beyond” — something which, I add, has always been close on the horizon in Altman’s world, although curiously has yet to materialize, or even come close to materializing.”

  95. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “OpenAI only makes 27% of its revenue from selling access to its models — around a billion dollars in annual recurring revenue — with the rest ($2.7 billion or so) coming from subscriptions to ChatGPT.”

  96. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “There really isn’t anything special about any of these companies anymore — they have no moat, their infrastructural advantage is moot, and their hordes of talent irrelevant.”

  97. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “We also know that OpenAI’s training and inference costs in 2024 were around $7 billion, meaning that either refining current models or building new ones is quite costly.”

  98. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Once these models are hosted elsewhere, and once DeepSeek's methods (which I'll get to shortly) are recreated (which won't take long), I believe we'll see that these prices are indicative of how cheap these models are to run.”

  99. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “OpenAI and Anthropic no longer have moats to raise capital with.”

  100. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “This isn’t a particularly exciting pitch to investors or the public markets, because there’s no product, innovation or business model to point to, and if they’d actually try and productize it and turn it into a business, it’s quite obvious at this point that there really isn’t a multi-trillion dollar industry for generative AI.”