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

Claims that can’t be checked by Gary Marcus, page 8 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 8 of 24: claims 701 to 800 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

    “The field is overdue for a rethink.”

  2. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Because they live in the land of correlations between images and text, not in the land of ideas.”

  3. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “These systems can draw things that kinda look like the world, but they obviously don’t know what’s what or how things work outside of their training data.”

  4. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Beauty is only skin deep.”

  5. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Thanks to scaling (and some other tricks), the graphics are terrific, and the ability to have it edit photos that you upload is genuinely cool.”

  6. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “But it’s all still just an extended form of mimicry, not something deeper, as the persistent failures with parts and wholes keep showing us.”

  7. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “The Klarna Effect may come back to haunt them.”

  8. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “If we stop hiring junior employees, we risk destroying the pipeline to expertis.”

  9. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Without saying for sure that I know what will happen next — after all things like stock prices and the valuations AI startups are as much a matter of unpredictable crowd psychology as they are of (in this case, shaky) technical and economic fundamentals — I will leave this here, a cartoon I made (with ChatGPT’s help!) in mid-July.”

  10. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Not that Sam is deterred; in his mind, a fuckup is just an excuse to ask for money:”

  11. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Once the markets really understand this, enthusiasm may indeed collapse fairly quickly.”

  12. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “The technical foundation was, as I argued all the way back to the early days of GPT-2, never strong enough to support the hype.”

  13. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “the user has the option to accept a code change or not, but with so many changes to make at such a rapid pace, a developer in hurrry (which is almost every developer) could easily miss an attack, and ok the change or run a command”

  14. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “(Nvidia advised, rightly, that everyone should disable Auto-Run mode if they’ve activated it, but we fear that many users may use it anyway, because it is so fast.)”

  15. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “As long as we have agents roaming the internet and otherwise incorporating data that they don’t fully understand – and LLMs don’t ever fully understand the data they are leveraging – there is enormous risk.”

  16. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Given current implementations of the technology, it's hard to imagine enough patches on the planet to thwart them all.”

  17. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Sure the advice is good, as far is it goes, but if the goods inside are valuable enough, motivated thieves may well still find a way.”

  18. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “The best defense would be not using agentic coding altogether.”

  19. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “But the tools are so seductive that we doubt many developers will resist.”

  20. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “There is a real sense in which GPT-5 is starting to look Altman’s Waterloo.”

  21. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Two years ago, many treated Altman like an oracle; in the eyes of many, Altman now looks more like a snake oil salesman.”

  22. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “As people begin to recognize that truth (the bitter lesson about limits of Sutton’s The Bitter Lesson), scientists will start to charts new paths. One of the new paths may even give rise to what we so desperately need: AI that we can trust.”

  23. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “But media coverage is not science, and braggadacio alone cannot yield AGI.”

  24. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “And you can’t make AI better if you drown out the critics and keep pouring good money after bad.”

  25. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “The LLM itself still isn’t inducing the rules. And this is a very special-purpose hack, not a remotely general solution. (And, e.g., it would likely fall apart if you changed the rules to play an alternative version of chess.)”

  26. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “But no matter how much LLMs mimic the patterns of human language, they are not like us. They sound like us, but they don’t think like us.”

  27. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Always regard them like the weird function approximators they are; never trust them.”

  28. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “We still feel that way. And the field still hasn’t put the time in.”

  29. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “That rumor is bullshit.”

  30. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “GPT-5 is unlikely to be ahead of the pack for more than a couple months.”

  31. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Certainly, in a rational world, their valuation would take a hit.”

  32. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “By rights, Altman’s reputation should by now be completely burned.”

  33. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “In hindsight, that was all bullshit.”

  34. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “After half a trillion dollars in that direction, it is obviously time to move on. The disappointing performance of GPT-5 should make that enormously clear.”

  35. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “And the worst part? Altman brought it all on himself. Had he not kept hinting at the moon, people might have been fine with just another incremental update.”

  36. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “All I am saying is give neurosymbolic AI with explicit world models a chance.”

  37. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “For all that, GPT-5 is not a terrible model.”

  38. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Nobody with intellectual integrity should still believe that pure scaling will get us to AGI.”

  39. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “We have been fed a steady diet of bullshit for the last several years.”

  40. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “He may not even be the right CEO for OpenAI anymore:”

  41. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “People are wising up that LLMs are not in fact AGI-adjacent.”

  42. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Pricing is good, but profits may continue to be elusive; still no clear technical moat.”

  43. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    ““AGI 2027” seems more and more remote by the day.”

  44. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Gary Marcus thinks that perhaps scaling is not in fact all you need.”

  45. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Cesspools of automatically-generated fake websites, rather than ChatGPT search, may ultimately come to be the single biggest threat that Google ever faces. After all, if users are left sifting through sewers full of useless misinformation, the value of search would go to zero—potentially killing the company.”

  46. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Current systems can mimic the kinds of words people use in completing tasks, often in contextually relevant ways, but that doesn’t really mean that they understand the things that they are doing; they have no concept of what it means to delete a database or make up a fictitious calendar entry.”

  47. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “What drives LLMs (and what drives the current batch of agents) is mimicry, and not what Ernest Davis and I called in 2019 deep understanding.”

  48. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “An important, publicly-visible system that can be beat in .001% of the times it is attacked is a mess.)”

  49. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Venture capitalists style themselves as brave funders of innovation, but in the current climate, they are anything but.”

  50. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “AI coding agents also seem to be incurring a large amount of technical debt, writing large amounts of copypasta code that is hard to debug.”

  51. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “(In fairness, ChatGPT agent wasn’t yet out when Penrose ran the test, but I would be surprised if their results were wildly different).”

  52. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “But I seriously doubt that LLMs will ever yield the substrate we need.”

  53. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “In a rational world, generative AI would be penalized for failing to meet expectations around agents; in the actual world, investors and big tech companies are continuing to pour on the gas.”

  54. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Perhaps after enough failures of AI agents, which shouldn’t be trusted with your calendar let alone your credit cards, reality may finally start settle in.”

  55. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Perhaps after enough failures of AI agents, which shouldn’t be trusted with your calendar let alone your credit cards, reality may finally start settle in.”

  56. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “the “demo to reality” issue they mention is exactly what we should expect — probably for a years to come:”

  57. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “found a result that I suspect will be typical: AI errors tend to compound over time.”

  58. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Yet more good money is being poured after bad. Staggeringly large amounts of money.”

  59. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “The “pushing the boundaries of what’s possible” that Roose promised us? Largely absent.”

  60. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Someday, I predict, the failure of current agents to produce much of lasting value will be seen as a poignant reflection of a massive mistake, intellectually and economically speaking: the mistake of investing almost solely in LLMs, as a kind of hopeful shortcut.”

  61. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “When AGI (artificial intelligence) comes, large language models like GPT-5 may be seen in hindsight as part of the eventual solution, but only as part of the solution.”

  62. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “If all seven predictions prove correct, I hope that the field will finally realize that it is time to move on.”

  63. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Absent any information of that kind, there is little reason to take on faith that whatever unknown techniques allowed them to do so well on IMO problems will generalize to any other kind of problem.”

  64. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Without question, these are impressive accomplishments.”

  65. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “The specific skills tested by IMO problems are sometimes useful in pursuing original mathematics, but they are far from the most important skills in original math research.”

  66. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Overall, the new work certainly might be exciting. Until outside scientists get to dig for a serious review we won’t really know for sure what it all means.”

  67. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “That’s simply preposterous. Being part of a 45-way tie for 27th place in a math contest for elite high school students is really not the kind of historic event that the moon landing was.”

  68. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Our point is just that the scratchy style is completely atypical of LLMs and suggests strongly that OpenAI-IMO is not simply a standard LLM, whatever it is.”

  69. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “This difference may reflect a limit in the OpenAI-IMO’s understanding. It certainly suggests that OpenAI-IMO would not make a very effective expositor of mathematical results.”

  70. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Awfully impressive. To be able to solve math problems at the level of the top 67 high school students in the world is to have really good math problem solving chops.”

  71. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “That said, some of the hype has reached completely absurd levels.”

  72. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “We need serious regulation to prevent AI’s from running amok. Voluntary agreements between companies are not going to cut it.”

  73. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “What crystallized for me over the last few days is that we have such a person.”

  74. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Forcing unreliable AI everywhere in the decision-making chain is not necessarily something we should want.”

  75. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Maybe someone will come to their senses and stop putting LLMs into military systems.”

  76. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “It is genuinely scary that Elon Musk went from being one of the first industry leaders warning about AI risks to being the most reckless of the AI leaders.”

  77. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Way out of line is right.”

  78. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “And industry-standard measures are unlikely to be enough, in any event.”

  79. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “I am at maybe 3% now, much higher than a month ago, contemplating what a wealthy, reckless megalomaniac might in the worst circumstances do, But I am still betting on Team Human for the foreseeable future.”

  80. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “ButI have seen enough to realize that there is a real risk, especially in the current anti-regulatory regime, that some exceptionally powerful person, Elon or otherwise, unconstrained in conventional ways, with a reckless disregard for humanity, could accidentally launch and spread an AI that deliberately or otherwise causes “significant harm to the world”.”

  81. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “But even so, I think most scenarios (e.g., people homebrewing biological weapons) could eventually be stopped, perhaps causing a lot of damage but coming nowhere near to literally extinguishing humanity.”

  82. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Absent systems cognitively rich enough to represent and reason about moral principles, I don’t how this can ever work.”

  83. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Part of my reasoning then was that actual malice on the part of AI was unlikely, at least any time soon.”

  84. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Worse, it is clear, even from Elon’s own posts on X, that the company is in over its head.”

  85. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “The fact that xAI can’t get its house together in even basic ways is disturbing.”

  86. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “We need liability, auditing, standards of malpractice, international treaties, too.”

  87. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Drones and even nuclear weapons may eventually be under LLM command.”

  88. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Getting to AGI will likely take still more breakthroughs.”

  89. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Largely because of Hinton’s influence, the field still talks about neurosymbolic AI as if it were a dirty word. That’s likely holding back the science.”

  90. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Massive infrastructure investments like Stargate are likely based on misleading impressions of what is actually driving progress.”

  91. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Admitting that they need to rely on neurosymbolic tools would pierce the scaling narrative.”

  92. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Hinton’s long-time hostility against any role at all for symbols has, in my judgement, cost the field dearly.”

  93. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Where the field is getting stuck now is likely on how to scale these new, neurosymbolic tools and how to make models “understand” when to use what and how to logically combine the context.”

  94. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “It would appear that it is only recently, in desperation, as scaling started to reach diminishing returns, that mainstream machine learning began to broaden its vistas.”

  95. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “There is likely still a great deal of work left to be done.”

  96. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “In my view, neither neural networks nor classical AI can really stand on their own.”

  97. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “We are drowning in a sea of mediocre prose precisely because LLMs, the backbone of virtually all current sytems, lack the underlying representational wherewithal to do better.”

  98. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “GPT-4 probably wasn’t (I suspect it included some symbolic filters in its guardrails), and o3, when it invokes code interpreter and symbolically-executed control structures certainly isn’t.”

  99. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “Fostering its further development may be among the best things that companies, researchers, and governments can do. Investors, take note.”

  100. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    “None of which means we are close to AGI. There are many ways to put together symbols and neural nets. I am not at all convinced we have the right one.”