Unresolved claims, page 21 of 22

Claims by Gary Marcus and Ed Zitron, as of 2026-10-31.

Unresolved claims (2,183)

We checked, and the evidence so far doesn’t settle it. Predictions whose deadline hasn’t come yet are under Not yet due.

Claims 2,001 to 2,100 of 2,183, newest first. Page 21 of 22.

Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-04-08
Gary Marcus
“It might be on the nice-to-have list; it will not mark the mythical singularity.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-04-06
Ed Zitron
“The lack of a robust labor movement within tech also contributes to this anxiety, with no unions to protect against layoffs caused by a company’s focus on generative AI.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-04-04
Gary Marcus
“Vulnerable patients shouldn’t be talking to chatbots that aren’t competent for this situation, and too much of the discussion in the media have made chatbots sound more intelligent and even more friendly than they are.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-03-30
Gary Marcus
“Virtually everyone, even at OpenAI, has acknowledged that there are serious risks, but thus far few tangible steps have been taken to mitigate them—either by government or industry.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-03-24
Gary Marcus
“The paper’s core claim— “GPT-4 attains a form of general intelligence [as] demonstrated by its core mental capabilities (such as reasoning, creativity, and deduction)”—literally cannot be tested with serious scrutiny, because the scientific community has no access to the training data.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-03-18
Gary Marcus
“if the definition of reasoning is to obtain valid conclusions from known facts, GPT-4 frequently falls short there, too.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-03-15
Gary Marcus
“It doesn’t actually solve any of the core problems of truthfulness and reliability that I laid out in my infamous March 2022 essay Deep Learning is Hitting a Wall.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-03-15
Gary Marcus
“On its own, it still requires frequent, massive retraining to be current with the news; GPT 3.5 knew nothing of 2022; GPT-4 seems to know little of 2023.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-03-15
Gary Marcus
“Because of all that, we don’t know what explains its success, and we don’t know how to predict its failures:”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-03-15
Gary Marcus
“Alignment is still shaky; you still wouldn’t be able to use it reliably to guide robots or scientific discovery, the kinds of things that made me excited about A(G)I in the first place.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-03-14
Gary Marcus
“Large language models are here to stay, their recipe well understood, and not hard for people skilled in the art to replicate; large pretrained models are out their for the taking on the dark web.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-03-14
Gary Marcus
“It will be an uphill, ongoing move-and-countermove arms race from here”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-03-14
Gary Marcus
“A lot of machine learning researchers are worried. And yet most people carry on as if they weren’t.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-03-12
Gary Marcus
“Minerva, for example, is trained on an immense amount of data, and ostensibly captures two-digit arithmetic, but it fails altogether on 4-digit multiplication,”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-03-12
Gary Marcus
“The request is perfectly clear, not a nonsensical question in any way. The prompt is perfectly sensible; the system just isn’t up to the job.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-03-12
Gary Marcus
“The same goes for essentially everything an LLMs talks about; there is a degree of generalization to similar examples, but distribution shift is hard (the crux of my own work going back to 1998), and nearly any generalization can be easily broken.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-03-10
Gary Marcus
“LLM-generated prose has already disrupted web forums and peer review processes, by flooding outlets with fake submissions.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-03-10
Gary Marcus
“New concerns are emerging almost literally day,.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-03-02
Gary Marcus
“I presented this example of how even the latest version of Bing, with its new guardrails, could still be manipulated to be useful to troll farms:”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-03-02
Gary Marcus
“Meanwhile, within a few hours, a 17-year-old high-school student had largely1 replicated what I was saying, and did so with a simpler, more elegant jailbreak prompt, zero prior context required2:”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-28
Gary Marcus
“What’s even more disturbing is that Bing makes it look like the false narrative that it generates is referenced.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-22
Gary Marcus
“Few people understand how they work; many people anthropomorphizing those chatbots, attributing to them real intelligence and emotion.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-22
Gary Marcus
“But no known technology can reliably align a chatbot in a persistent way to a human’s emotional needs.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-22
Gary Marcus
“with the new generation of chatbots, we will see addictions no less potent.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-20
Gary Marcus
“Right now, as I have said before, the AI is basically the Wild West; anyone can post any chatbot they want.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-20
Gary Marcus
“This would be very bad news, not just in terms of human and economic costs (which would mean more underpaid layers doing awful work) but also in terms of trustworthiness, because it would be mean that we have zero guarantee that any new iteration of a large language model is going to safe.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-20
Gary Marcus
“Anyone who watched the last week unfold will realize that the new Bing has (or had1) a tendency to get really wild, from declaring a love that it didn’t really have to encouraging people to get divorced to blackmailing them to teaching people how to commit crimes, and so on.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-17
Gary Marcus
“The problems in physical and psychological reasoning that we pointed in the Fall of 2020 very much remain.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-17
Gary Marcus
“But, as is evident from Eisenberg’s experiment, GPT-3 was not even able to generalize from moving a toy to moving a bookmark.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-17
Gary Marcus
“For one thing, what we publish often gets incorporated into the training; perhaps in company benchmarks as well.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-17
Gary Marcus
“But In practice, that isn’t going to happen.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-17
Gary Marcus
“However, just in terms of percentage right vs. wrong, the improvement was slight; It now got 50% right, 40% wrong, and 10% borderline (marginally better than the 45% right before).”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-16
Gary Marcus
“each reflect the fact that you cannot build AI in the real world from Big Data and deep learning alone.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-16
Gary Marcus
“There was a broken image link, and I went so fast I neglected to mention the personally salient fact that Bing had lied about me, claiming that I believe that “Bing’s AI was more accurate and reliable than Bard”, when I never said any such thing.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-16
Gary Marcus
“Microsoft can (at least to a first approximation) do whatever the hell it wants with Bing.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-16
Gary Marcus
“There are almost no regulations here; we are living in the Wild AI West.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-16
Ed Zitron
“The result will be genuine human suffering as a result of dressing a fallible, experimental intelligence up as an authoritative source of information. People will be inspired to harm themselves or others, all while their ideas and likenesses are counterfeited and monetized, all so that wealthy executives can tell the world - and Wall Street - that their companies are “innovative.””
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-11
Gary Marcus
“And, bonus, there is little if any government regulation in place to do much about this.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-09
Gary Marcus
“I do actually think that these problems will eventually get ironed out, possibly after some important fresh discoveries are made, but whether they get ironed out soon is another matter entirely.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-09
Ed Zitron
“These moves are unquestionably hurting Google, to the point that Microsoft’s Bing (paired with OpenAI’s ChatGPT), has gained major headlines for providing the service that everybody wished Google would.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-06
Ed Zitron
“Mark Zuckerberg was wrong about the metaverse, Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon were wrong about Web3, David Sacks was wrong about just about everything, and Google has obfuscated the purpose of their search engine so badly that they have had to beg their co-founders to return to help fight OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a product from a company of a few hundred people which just got a $14 billion investment from their biggest competitor (just after said competitor laid off 10,000 people).”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-03
Gary Marcus
“Our new systems work better, but they are still superficial, fine for lab demos but often at a loss in the real world.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-03
Gary Marcus
“Deep learning has undeniably made amazing progress, on other dimensions, but the fact is it hasn’t solved the core problems that many of us thought were essential 30 years ago.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-03
Gary Marcus
“Melanie Mitchell’s book, Bender et al’s “Stochastic Parrots”; all of these more recent criticisms of deep learning help establish that some of the basic issues that were known long ago, with predecessors to current models, still remain even today.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-03
Gary Marcus
“Not sure how much has changed in that regard, either, except that the hacks that were once written by graduate students are now farmed out to sweatshops, for a new form of handcrafting:”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-03
Gary Marcus
“Turns out you don’t need to solve them to make beautiful pictures, or decent if error-filled conversation, but anyone who thinks we can get to AGI without solving abstraction, compositionality, and the type-token distinction is kidding themselves.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-03
Gary Marcus
“The measures are new, the model is new, but the stumbling block remains the same.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-02
Gary Marcus
“And I still attribute those problems to a lack of world models that represent the ways in which things unfold over time. I still see this as the central flaw in large language models.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-02
Gary Marcus
“But more than three years on, it’s still—even after a new update a few days ago focused around math—having lot of problems with easy word problems like this:”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-02-02
Gary Marcus
“I said the problem wasn’t math per se, but that large language models didn’t represent robust world models of how events fold over time; I stand by this 100% even today.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-01-31
Gary Marcus
“Anyone who thinks about how AI is used should know about it—especially as we are about to head into an era of ubiquitous yet fallible AI.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-01-22
Gary Marcus
“Machines will just get more and more reliable and more general.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-01-22
Gary Marcus
“Neither one of us believes for a minute that large language models are remotely close to artificial general intelligence, and what’s more, we mostly agree about what’s missing: semantics, reasoning, common sense, theory of mind and so on.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-01-22
Gary Marcus
“I think that in achieving AGI we will have no choice but to find ways of integrating whatever we can get out of deep learning with explicit knowledge and explicit cognitive models.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-01-22
Gary Marcus
“A decent fraction of the AI community has already recognized that the primary forte of large language models is in generating bullshit; many also see that the current path to autonomous vehicles is not making the progress that some expected.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-01-22
Gary Marcus
“In a recent Wired article, I predicted that 2023 see the first death attributable to large language models, and I stand by that prediction.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-01-22
Gary Marcus
“The neurosymbolic AI community is growing fast; conferences that used to be dozens are now thousands.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-01-14
Gary Marcus
“ChatGPT simply cannot reason well enough to to do this; as I have documented in previous essays, it has demonstrably misunderstood physics, biology, psychology, medicine, and so forth.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-01-14
Gary Marcus
“It is not contributing genuine ideas, nor coming up with carefully controlled experimental designs, nor summing up prior literature in thoughtful ways.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-01-14
Gary Marcus
“We are going to see a lot of this – misuses of ChatGPT in which people trust it, and even trumpet it—when it’s flat-out wrong.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-01-11
Gary Marcus
“That’s a lot, and not the sort of thing that a rocketship startup would typically agree to.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-01-11
Gary Marcus
“Meanwhile, large language models themselves are quickly becoming commodities; it’s not clear that there is any unique, protectable intellectual property here.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-01-09
Gary Marcus
“For another, although OpenAI may be tracking errors like these for internal purposes, the scientific community has no access to whatever they have collected, which leaves it in the lurch.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-01-09
Gary Marcus
“For one thing, although many people seem to have heard of a few of these errors (e.g. from reports in the media), few realize how pervasive or broad in scope they are; indeed a recent Twitter thread that claimed falsely that these problems had been resolved got a surprising amount of traction.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-01-09
Gary Marcus
“ChatGPT made all the same kinds of mistakes that its predecessors did.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-01-09
Gary Marcus
“It is therefore impossible for external scientists to determine to what extent any specific correct answer merely reflects some very similar examples in the training data.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-01-09
Gary Marcus
“ChatGPT couldn’t, for example, reliably count to four (figure 1) or do one-digit arithmetic in the context of simple word problem (figure 2).”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2023-01-09
Gary Marcus
“In our opinion, this was inevitable, in a system that has been trained to optimize the goal of producing one plausible-sounding word after another rather than actually engage with the meaning of language.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-12-31
Gary Marcus
“(Spoiler alert: they’re not, at least not yet.)”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-12-30
Gary Marcus
“But as they do so, as they glom stuff together, something often gets lost in translation: which bits of text do and do not truly belong together.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-12-30
Gary Marcus
“Once again, the result was fluent prose, and once again, hallucination ruled:”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-12-30
Gary Marcus
“As it happens, large language models are also wicked hard to update, typically requiring full retraining, sometimes taking weeks or months.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-12-30
Gary Marcus
“Which means for example that ChatGPT, released in November, is so old it doesn’t know who owns Twitter:”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-12-25
Gary Marcus
“Without external aids it won’t be able beat Meta’s Cicero in Diplomacy; it won’t be able to drive a car reliably; it won’t be able to reliably guide a robot like Optimus to be anything like as versatile as Rosie the Robot.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-12-25
Gary Marcus
“GPT-4 will be trained on considerably more, a significant fraction of the internet as a whole.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-12-25
Gary Marcus
“Its natural language output still won’t be something that one can reliably hook up to downstream programs; it won’t be something, for example, that you can simply and directly hook up to a database or virtual assistant, with predictable results.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-12-25
Gary Marcus
“GPT-4 may be better at faking term papers, but if it follows the same playbook as it predecessors, it still won’t really understand the world, and seams will eventually show.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-12-25
Gary Marcus
“GPT-4 will not have reliable models of the things that it talks about that are accessible to external programmers in a way that reliably feeds downstream processes.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-12-25
Gary Marcus
“As I told NYT columnist Farhad Manjoo, ChatGPT, like earlier, related systems is “still not reliable, still doesn’t understand the physical world, still doesn’t understand the psychological world and still hallucinates.””
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-12-25
Gary Marcus
“Although GPT-4 will definitely seem smarter than its predecessors, its internal architecture remains problematic.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-12-25
Gary Marcus
“Which is to say it makes stuff up, regularly; a fair bit of what it is says simply isn’t true.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-12-25
Gary Marcus
“When it comes out, it will totally eclipse ChatGPT; it’s safe bet that even more people will be talking about it..”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-12-25
Gary Marcus
““Scaling” alone—building bigger and models until they absorb the entire internet — will prove useful, but only to a point.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-12-25
Gary Marcus
“Trustworthy, general artificial intelligence, aligned with human values, will come, when it does, from systems that are more structured, with more built-in knowledge, and will incorporate at least some degree of explicit tools for reasoning and planning, as well as explicit it knowledge, that are lacking in systems like GPT.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-12-10
Gary Marcus
“they cost almost nothing to operate, and so they are on a path to reducing the cost of generating disinformation to zero.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-12-10
Gary Marcus
“they can easily be automated to generate misinformation at unprecedented scale.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-12-10
Gary Marcus
“If the website is flooded with worthless code examples, programmers will no longer go there, its database of over 30 million questions and answers will become untrustworthy, and the 14 year old website will die.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-12-01
Gary Marcus
“GPT”s heavy use of a technique called embeddings makes it really good at substituting synonyms and more broadly related phrases, but the same tendency towards substitution often lead it astray.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-12-01
Gary Marcus
“When GPT sounds plausible, it is because every paraphrased bit that it pastes together is grounded in something that actual humans said, and there is often some vague (but often irrelevant) relationship between..”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-12-01
Gary Marcus
“Almost everything it says is fluent and at least vaguely plausible.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-11-25
Gary Marcus
“As it turns out, the architecture of Cicero differs profoundly from most of what’s been talked about in recent years in AI.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-11-22
Gary Marcus
“See also my essay on Google’s Palm-SayCan, for what might happen if this tech were embedded in robots, which would be even more risky.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-11-22
Gary Marcus
“if Alexa could converse freely, user expectations would go through the roof, and mostly be unmeetable.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-11-22
Gary Marcus
“Turning LLMs into a product that controls your home and talks to you in a way that would be reliable enough to use at scale in millions of homes is still a long, long way away.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-11-16
Gary Marcus
“Just like every other large language model I have seen.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-11-16
Gary Marcus
“High school students will love it, and use it to fool and intimidate (some of) their teachers.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-11-09
Gary Marcus
“The problem is about to get much, much worse.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-11-09
Gary Marcus
“As the pace of machine-generated misinformation picks up, Twitter’s existing effort, Community Notes (aka Birdwatch), which is mostly done manually, by humans, is going to get left in the dust.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-11-09
Gary Marcus
“Large language models are without equal at generating misinformation, but they suck at detecting it.”
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid 2022-11-09
Gary Marcus
“Scaling won’t solve this.”