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

Claims that can’t be checked by Gary Marcus, page 11 of 24

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

Claims that can’t be checked by Gary Marcus (2370)

Public evidence cannot settle these claims, so they are recorded and attributed, not scored. Most were screened out: both AI providers read the claim on its own and found it a value judgment, rhetoric, hedged, too vague to test, or about something no public evidence could show. The rest were found to be recommendations or too open to test in a full review.

Page 11 of 24: claims 1001 to 1100 of 2370, ordered by the date first said, newest first. To find a claim by its words, use search.

  1. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Per the 80:20 rule I described a few days ago, it’s easy to make demos; 80% of driving, 80% of some scientific problem, etc. Getting the last 20% is often really really hard.”

  2. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “A set of problems that have resisted solution for a quarter century, even backed by a half trillion dollars, probably aren’t all going to get solved so quickly.”

  3. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “If it is this unreliable on arithmetic, it will be this unreliable on everything else, and we shouldn’t accord it the society-changing power that people intend to accord it.”

  4. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “The fact that GPT 4.5 is wildly expensive relative to its competitors, and the fact that future models following the same trajectory of scale might be prohibitively expensive, especially in a regime in which nobody has a moat and price wars have been intensifying since the release of DeepSeek.”

  5. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “I completely agree with Klein that AGI will matter a lot when it comes.”

  6. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “It actually seems to me that US may be all but surrendering the AGI race over to China.”

  7. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Having observed the pace of science and engineering firsthand over the last half century, the middle scenario seems to me like – by far – the most plausible.”

  8. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “And, importantly, the reverse of what Mollick said is also true: we have to consider the scenario that the proposition that AGI is imminent is false.”

  9. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Automatically generated bullshit still seems to be the norm.”

  10. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “I am not convinced that anything anyone could realistically do with LLMs won’t be almost immediately copied, as has been the recent trend.”

  11. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “I couldn’t help but think that the US’s single-minded commitment to Large Language Models, predicated on implausible assumptions about AGI’s imminence, particularly combined with the untimely gutting of its scientific institutions, could ultimately lead to its undoing.”

  12. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “If LLMs are the wrong path to AGI, as I and a great many academics think, we may have a lot of thinking to do. We may be massively wasting resources, and getting locked into a lot foolish battles around the wrong technology.”

  13. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “In a time when Trump is dismantling American research infrastructure, it should have been front and center.”

  14. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “If getting to AGI in the next three years is not quite as certain as the sun rising every day from the east, we might want to hedge our bets, and try to focus on what the field of AI need to develop besides scaling.”

  15. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “With people like Roose hyping automated coding, we may well find ourselves with too few coders.”

  16. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Anyone can download the code, and probably most or all of the AI systems were trained on this and other similar examples.”

  17. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “This will leave the US flat-foooted.”

  18. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “None of this may matter much in a lunch-recipe recommender, but errors in an automatic email writing system could cause serious harm.”

  19. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “In the end, this essay, like a lot of Roose’s pieces, comes off as marketing for AI companies, even though it is framed as reporting. The Times owes its readers better.”

  20. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “By hyping the tech largely uncritically, the Rooses and Newtons of the world make the tech oligarchy stronger; society inevitably has to bear the costs.”

  21. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Errors in the code of automatic code writing systems will likely persist for decades, especially when they are forced to construct genuinely novel systems.”

  22. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Altman’s credibility has diminished.”

  23. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Altman was the right CEO to launch ChatGPT, but he may not have the intellectual vision to get them to the next level.”

  24. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “GPT 4.5, vibes and all, are the best Altman’s got. He was bluffing the whole time.”

  25. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “OpenAI is likely still losing money on every prompt.”

  26. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “This was OpenAI’s best shot, post DeepSeek, to show that they are still the king.Instead, they swung and missed.”

  27. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “In short, potential investors should be asking hard questions, both about Sam, as a technical manager, and about the company’s ability to deliver.”

  28. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “GPT 4.5 appears to be the system that was supposed to be GPT-5, relabeled in order to manage expectations downwards.”

  29. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “If Masayoshi Son changes his mind about investing tens of billion of dollar in them, OpenAI will have serious cash problems.”

  30. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “When he told us “We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it”, he was obviously fibbing.”

  31. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “All the bullshit about GPT-5 we listened to for the last couple years: not so true.”

  32. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Scaling data and compute is not a physical law, and pretty much everything I have told you was true.”

  33. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Grok 3 didn’t fundamentally change things, and GPT 4.5 – which was probably supposed to be GPT 5 – didn’t either.”

  34. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “What I said almost a year ago still holds true, especially when coupled with the equally underwhelming performance of the similarly massive Grok 3:”

  35. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “But minor variations seems to be all that is emerging, despite the enormous investments.”

  36. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “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.”

  37. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Investors should also be looking at the prospects for “solving” AI with pure scaling, which is after all much of the vision Nvidia is selling.”

  38. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “But IMHO people investing their money in Nvidia shouldn’t be looking just at quarterly reports (which might be good, since people continue to buy their gold rush shovels in bulk—for now).”

  39. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “GPT 4.5 is unlikely to revolutionize AI”

  40. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “In reality GPT 4.5 is unlikely to meet high expectations, per The Information:”

  41. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “All this looks to be true for GPT 4.5 as well.”

  42. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “He has done so much harm in recent weeks, though, ranging from violent cuts on science research to, in a deeply Orwellian move, preparing to feed massive amounts of private information into unreliable generative AI for the purposes of making employment decisions that I no longer find him remotely reasonable.”

  43. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Success Theater”

  44. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “But today’s date should never be multiple guess.”

  45. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “No game changers; no major leap forward, here.”

  46. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “[Update 1: probably not, per an OpenAI employee who posted some previously unreleased o3 data that appeared show o3 beating Grok3 on two benchmarks]”

  47. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “I didn’t notice anything truly original.”

  48. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Sam Altman can breathe easy for now.”

  49. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “There is no question that this is a very impressive accomplishment.”

  50. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “We see no reason at all to call it “superhuman”.”

  51. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Still, an important takeaway is a familiar one about benchmarks: they are often narrowly constructed, and one shouldn’t overgeneralize a strong result on a benchmark for a full conceptual understanding of a problem.”

  52. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “This seems too strong to us, because the system is actually sidestepping a critical part of IMO challenges: understanding the English statement of the problems; by preconverting each problem into formal notation, there is a sense in which DeepMind has given their system an unfair start, and not grappled with something essential.”

  53. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “It is disappointing that a top research team confused success on a prestigious competition with mastery of a foundational subject matter, and tiresome to see the media overhype things as ever.”

  54. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “We have always felt that greater modularity will be a necessary part of future AI, and welcome these kinds of explorations.”

  55. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “This is not where we should be as a nation.”

  56. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “The problem here, by the way, isn’t just the blatant propaganda, but the more subtle stuff, that people may not even notice.”

  57. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “This isn’t free speech. It’s a massive, massive thumb on the scale, from one of the most powerful yet unelected people in the world.”

  58. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Everyone—and not just The Information—should be genuinely terrified that the richest man in the world has built a Large Language Model that spouts propaganda in his image.”

  59. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “If Altman knew how to build AGI, he would build it. Instead, he rechristened Orion as GPT 4.5 rather than 5, which likely means that despite major bills, Orion never met the expectations so-called scaling laws had implied.”

  60. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “All this time, it turns out, Altman was bluffing.”

  61. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Neurosymbolic AI, which I have long championed, may turn out to be part of the mix.”

  62. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “If they called Orion GPT-5, reactions would likely converge for many on “is that all there is?”. OpenAI’s mystique might well take a serious hit.”

  63. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “The company’s future rests on them doing something truly revolutionary, and Orion turns out not to be that.”

  64. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “In all likelihood AGI will some day arrive, with or without LLMs at the core, and likely with all kinds of other gadgets included.”

  65. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Scaling is useful, but it is not now and never was the whole answer.”

  66. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “By turning down Musk’s bid, Altman makes it hard to justify paying the nonprofit anything less than the $97B that was just offered.”

  67. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Altman desperately needs to ditch the OpenAI nonprofit. It’s become an albatross around his neck.”

  68. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “All of this has the effect of potentially slowing down Musk’s competitor Altman, who can ill afford an extra $50B+ outlay given his current cash flow situation.”

  69. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Roughly speaking, this means that (at little real cost, since the bid was never going to be accepted) Musk has more than doubled the cost of OpenAI for-profit’s freedom.”

  70. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “If AI has significant negative externalities upon the world, we the citizens are screwed.”

  71. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “He’s absolutely right, we should worry about authoritarian uses of AI.”

  72. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Right now, it isn’t.”

  73. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Unless we speak up very, very loudly, it won’t.”

  74. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Regulatory capture seemed huge:”

  75. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “It would accomplish little, and let too many people off the hook, allowing them to say that they had addressed AI risks without actually doing all that much.”

  76. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Considering all the big names that were assembled, this all feels like a wasted opportunity.”

  77. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “I tend to agree with those that feel that the draft should not be signed.”

  78. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “People have been adding data and compute left and right since August 2022 when OpenAI demo’d GPT-4 to Bill Gates, but despite literally hundreds of billions of investment, pure LLM scaling has not produced the fruit some people imagined.”

  79. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Another of the key suggestions I made in 2022 was that we should use neurosymbolic techniques, combining neural networks with classical symbolic techniques such as rules.”

  80. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “We got one more huge advance since the 2022 paper (I was agnostic then as to how many more leaps there would be), but we still don’t have a system that would really merit the name of GPT-5.”

  81. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “So much for exponential progress.”

  82. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Let that be a lesson to all AI developers. What’s been released cannot be unreleased.”

  83. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “That news confirms something I have long feared; no matter how much you must trust a company or its management, things can eventually change.”

  84. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “(In fairness, ChatGPT doesn’t really lie; it just spews text that often bears little resemblance to reality, but you get my drift).”

  85. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “As against all the constant claims of exponential progress that I see practically every day, ChatGPT still seems likes pretty much the same mix of brilliance and stupidity that I wrote about, more than two years ago:”

  86. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “But it is not just s scammers; the larger problem may be naive people who believe that the outputs are legit, or who use it as a shortcut for writing journal articles, missing the errors it produces.”

  87. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Amodei is correct that DeepSeek didn't do anything in terms of cost reductions that wouldn't have happened here before too long, anyway.”

  88. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “We should be thinking about how to sponsor innovation, and recognize that the best funded companies aren't always the most innovative. Going all in on them is a mistake.”

  89. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “The country that does its best to develop a new tech that is more reliable and more difficult to replicate will win.”

  90. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “(Still embarrassing to the US giants though that a leaner, hungrier startup abroad got there first.)”

  91. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Amodei's biggest advantage is having more chips, and I understand him wanting to prosecute that advantage, but what we really need are better ideas, and the oxygen for innovative startups to breathe.”

  92. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “My takeaway is different: the LLM race is an enormously expensive effort to win a race that can no longer be won.”

  93. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “DeepSeek definitely has him rattled. The piece is a long and articulate, but also quite defensive.”

  94. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “This seems plausible. DeepSeek may well have broken OpenAI’s Terms of Service and distilled1 their intellectual property without permission.”

  95. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Karma is a bitch.”

  96. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “OpenAI may well have done analogous things to YouTube, New York Times, and countless artists and writers.”

  97. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “DeepSeek is an economic revolution, and geopolitical wake-up call, but that doesn't directly bring us any closer to AGI.”

  98. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Furthermore, unlike some companies I could name, DeepSeek is actually, well, Open, which may help them lure talent from more walled off operations..”

  99. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “GenAI economics could get wild.”

  100. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Putting so many eggs in Altman’s basket, as the White House did last week and others have before, may also prove to be a mistake in hindsight.”