“It’s also not even remotely new.”
Our reading, the sentence that was checked:
The finding that geography can be inferred from language corpora is not new; earlier work from 2009 and 2017 showed similar results.
Assessment: Supported Evidence as of
Where and when Gary Marcus wrote it
Marcus on AI, Muddles about Models, paragraph 5.
- Said
- Source observed
- live page, full text, public
- Evidence as of
- the cutoff for this assessment
- Assessment recorded
- assessment marcus-muddles-about-models-b5604c-a1
We recorded 9 claims from this post. See every claim from this post.
The wording above is the version this site observed on 2026-10-29. The source may have been edited after 2023-10-05. 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
- not even remotely new
- geography can be weakly but imperfectly inferred from language corpora
- earlier results that are essentially similar
- 2017
- 2009
Our interpretation
- The claim concerns the earlier discovery of geographic information in text-derived representations, not whether every contribution of the 2023 paper lacked novelty.
- Similar results means recovering approximate geographic locations or spatial relationships from language corpora. Identical models, datasets and accuracy are not required.
Counts as supported if: The named earlier research demonstrates approximate geographic recovery from text-derived representations.
Counts as contradicted if: The earlier studies do not recover geographic information from language corpora, or their relevant findings first appeared after the 2023 paper.
Retrospective: these criteria were written after the outcome was public.
Current assessment
Was it true for the period described?
Outcome: Supported
The dated evidence matches what the claim committed to, under the criteria frozen before grading.
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
The 2009 study recovered geographic relationships from newspaper text. The 2017 paper evaluated geographic positions recovered from older word embeddings. These establish Marcus's narrow historical point: approximate geographic information had already been recovered from language corpora.
Limitations
- This does not establish that the 2023 paper lacked other novel contributions or achieved no improvement.
- The 2009 availability date is conservatively represented by the end of its documented publication month; the accessible record does not establish the exact day.
Evidence (2 items)
Supports the claim: Cognitive Science; abstract reproduced by PubMed,
MDS coordinates
Why it matters here: Louwerse and Zwaan recovered geographic relationships among 50 US cities using newspaper text, latent semantic analysis and multidimensional scaling. This directly establishes the earlier finding Marcus describes.
- Publisher
- Cognitive Science; abstract reproduced by PubMed
- Kind of source
- Peer-reviewed paper
- Describes events of
- Public from
Supports the claim: Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing / ACL Anthology,
geographical positions of cities.
Why it matters here: Konkol and colleagues evaluated geographic positions recoverable through linear transformations of older word embeddings. This establishes a comparable research task years before the 2023 paper.
- Publisher
- Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing / ACL Anthology
- Kind of source
- Peer-reviewed paper
- Describes events of
- Public from
Where it was said (1)
Said once in the sources this register covers.
: Marcus on AI, Muddles about Models
It’s also not even remotely new.
- Where
- paragraph 5
- Published
- 2023-10-05
- Source observed
- , live page
- Access
- full text, public
History
Assessment versions
- Assessment marcus-muddles-about-models-b5604c-a1: Current. Outcome: Supported. 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.