Claims that can’t be checked, page 22 of 37

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

Claims that can’t be checked (3690)

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 22 of 37: claims 2101 to 2200 of 3690, ordered by the date first said, newest first. To find a claim by its words, use search.

Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-21
Gary Marcus
“I wish that others would give lines in the sand in advance; instead, they are likely to craft definitions post hoc, or not give them at all.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-21
Gary Marcus
“And I am saying, as every roboticist on the planet knows, that we shouldn’t take demos seriously, until purported products are actually released and subjected to outside scrutiny.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-21
Gary Marcus
“Furthermore, the impact of all this on the environment could be immense.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-21
Gary Marcus
“As in O3 may work for problems where massive data augmentation is possible, but not in others where it’s not.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-21
Gary Marcus
“I couldn’t agree more. Yesterday’s demo, impressive as it was, doesn’t change that.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-21
Gary Marcus
“Nothing in the o3 presentation yesterday suggested to me that this decades-old core problem has been remotely solved.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-16
Ed Zitron
“You talking about the truth behind generative AI, or the harms of Facebook, or the gratuitous destruction of Google Search will change things, because these people are unprepared for a public that knows both what they’ve done and their sickening, loathsome, selfish and greedy intentions.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-16
Ed Zitron
“This has irreparably damaged the internet in ways I believe few fully understand.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-16
Ed Zitron
“These companies unleashed generative AI on the world — or, in the case of Microsoft, facilitated its ascendency — without any consideration of what that would mean for the Internet as an ecosystem.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-16
Ed Zitron
“Be the person who tells people that Sam Altman burns $5 billion a year on unsustainable software that destroys the environment and is built upon the large-scale larceny of creative works because he's desperate for power.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-16
Ed Zitron
“Sam Altman is a con artist, a liar, and a sleazy carnival barker who would burn our planet to the ground, steal from millions of people and burn billions of dollars in pursuit of power, and I believe the same can be said of people like Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Mustafa Suleyman of Microsoft.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-16
Ed Zitron
“Sam Altman is a con artist, a liar, and a sleazy carnival barker who would burn our planet to the ground, steal from millions of people and burn billions of dollars in pursuit of power, and I believe the same can be said of people like Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Mustafa Suleyman of Microsoft.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-14
Gary Marcus
“The problems by now seem clear. Suchir was right to consider them.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-14
Gary Marcus
“Society needs to do more to protect people like Suchir Balaji.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-14
Gary Marcus
“It is unfortunate that CA SB-1047’s whistleblower protections were vetoed.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-12
Gary Marcus
“I wouldn’t take seriously any of its anthropomorphic language about LLMs “knowing” or having scheming or having intentions to deceive, etc.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-12
Gary Marcus
“They more power we give them (but hooking up them to agents, people, etc), the more risk we are incurring.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-12
Gary Marcus
“Even if machines don’t ever rise up a la the Terminator, a bad actor could still leverage LLMs to cause massive mayhem. Possibly soon.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-12
Gary Marcus
“The important thing is that paper makes it very clear that nobody should ever take LLMs at their word.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-12
Gary Marcus
“The longer we delay in regulation, the more risk we are incurring.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-12
Gary Marcus
“There’s a lot of anthropomorphism here in this paper that I find hard to take, but it is in other ways a smart and carefully considered paper — and ought to be a wakeup call.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-12
Gary Marcus
“That may leave all of us extremely vulnerable to this mess.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-11
Gary Marcus
“I don’t doubt this, when stated so vaguely, but you can’t improve the engineering if you can’t identify the problems and weak points, such that you can address them.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-11
Gary Marcus
“But ignoring all the evidence that suggests that we won’t be there in the very near term does a disservice to his pretense towards objectivity.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-11
Gary Marcus
“Our best defense against the possible dangers of superintelligence must begin with a realistic appraisal of where we are and how much time we have.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-11
Gary Marcus
“A massive investment of hundreds of billions is unlikely to pay off.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-10
Gary Marcus
“The John Locke hypothesis that you can learn physics purely from sense data is failing, over, and over, and over again; this time perhaps (if I had to guess) to the tune of a billion dollars.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-08
Gary Marcus
“One plausible explanation is that OpenAI has put a lot more work, with data augmentation and other such techniques, into math word problems than into image generation.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-08
Gary Marcus
“Relating language and the visual world robustly may require altogether new approaches to learning language.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-08
Gary Marcus
“Until then the foundations of AI remain unsteady.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-06
Gary Marcus
“AI needs substantive regulation.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-06
Gary Marcus
“Many downsides are already heere, and potential misuse in the military seems imminent.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-06
Gary Marcus
“As AI comes to have more power in society, AI skepticism becomes an increasingly important counterweight, and we should all want AI skepticism to be done right.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-06
Gary Marcus
“We ought to prepare – now – for AI to get a lot more dangerous than it already is.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-06
Gary Marcus
“Newton is of course right that we need to prepare for AGI, whenever it comes.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-06
Gary Marcus
“If there is even a 5% chance I am wrong about diminishing returns, we still ought to be moving immediately to prepare.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-06
Gary Marcus
“Likewise, an AI with a known tendency to hallucinate things can be used to target weapon (this as may happen soon, given the recent announcement that OpenAI will collaborate with Anduril).”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-06
Gary Marcus
“We need, for example, a global treaty, and those tend to take a decade. Let’s get moving, people.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-06
Gary Marcus
“If AGI dropped tomorrow, given the almost total lack of regulation with real teeth, I seriously doubt we as a society would be ready for it.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-06
Gary Marcus
“LLM’s in particular are wildly overrated.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-06
Gary Marcus
“I also always say we need hybrid systems that include LLMs as one tool among many, never that that LLMs will altogether disappear, even if they become a commodity and valuations fall.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-05
Gary Marcus
“But, left unregulated, it probably will.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-05
Gary Marcus
“And it’s not just United; one of the biggest applications of AI seems to be ripping off customers.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-03
Ed Zitron
“Microsoft is cherry-picking a number based on non-specific criteria and claiming it's a big deal, when it's actually pretty pathetic considering its capital expenditures will likely hit over $60 billion in 2024.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-03
Ed Zitron
“While one can dazzle investors with buzzwords and charts, the laws of physics are a far harsher mistress, and if NVIDIA is struggling mere months before the first installations are to begin, it's unclear how it practically launches this generation of chips, let alone continues its yearly cadence.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-03
Ed Zitron
“While NVIDIA might be able to fix this problem in isolation within its racks, it remains to be seen how this works at scale as they ship and integrate hundreds of thousands of Blackwell GPUs starting in the front half of 2025.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-03
Ed Zitron
“While some have claimed that "agents are the next frontier," the reality is that agents may be the last generative AI product — multiple Large Language Models and integrations bouncing off of each other in an attempt to simulate what a human might do at a cost that won't be sustainable for the majority of businesses.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-03
Ed Zitron
“Generative AI isn’t a revolution, it’s an evolution of a tech industry overtaken by growth-hungry management consultant types that neither know the problems that real people face nor how to fix them.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-03
Ed Zitron
“The fact that NVIDIA is having such significant difficulties with thermal performance is very, very bad.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-03
Ed Zitron
“And worse still, nothing has really come out of this movement.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-03
Ed Zitron
“Sam Altman has grown rich and powerful lying about how GPT will somehow lead to AGI, but at this point, what exactly is OpenAI meant to do?”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-03
Ed Zitron
“Even if he ultimately fails, should Musk manage to drag the process out, or delay it temporarily, it could strike a terminal blow for OpenAI.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-12-03
Ed Zitron
“Outside of a miracle, we are about to enter an era of desperation in the generative AI space.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-28
Gary Marcus
“At the end of the Ezra Klein interview, I called for a massive investment in new approaches to AI. I still think that is the way to go.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-26
Gary Marcus
“If you have anything at all private or sensitive in Office documents, you might want to do the same.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-26
Gary Marcus
“Every big tech company is desperate for training data, and we can expect more companies following the same sly opt-out playbook, hiding what is going in obscure settings and Terms of Service nobody reads.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-26
Gary Marcus
“The key point of my recent book Taming Silicon Valley is directly relevant here: none of us stand any chance against big tech unless we stand together.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-26
Gary Marcus
“If we don’t, they will walk all over all of us.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-26
Gary Marcus
“I would appreciate further, on-the-record clarification from a named member of the company, resolving the appearance of possible contradiction.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-26
Gary Marcus
“Absent a clear statement in the Terms of Service, I personally remain uncertain.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-24
Gary Marcus
“Third, scaling laws aren’t really laws anymore (if they ever were). The meaning of the word scaling has been greatly devalued.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-24
Gary Marcus
“Trying to rescue LLMs by making a system that is inherently blind to factuality run longer — rather than better—is like smearing water around wet plates.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-24
Gary Marcus
“We can and must do better. Scaling can only take us so far; the time has come for fresh invention.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-24
Gary Marcus
“My guess is o1’s test time scaling works best in closed domains where you can create a lot of reliable synthetic data (such as math problems), and not so well in open-ended domains.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-24
Gary Marcus
“I suggest you keep your hands on your wallets here.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-24
Gary Marcus
“Scaling can only take us so far; the time has come for fresh invention.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-23
Gary Marcus
“In recent weeks, the third stage has finally arrived.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-23
Gary Marcus
“Almost a half decade lost, when we could have been seriously investing in other approaches and might have made genuine progress towards robust, trustworthy artificial intelligence.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-23
Gary Marcus
“What’s at stake? Science gets delayed.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-23
Gary Marcus
“The point was that we probably needed new architectures.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-19
Gary Marcus
“Gary Marcus hopes he has taught you by now to never trust the hype.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-13
Ed Zitron
“OpenAI being "worth" $157 billion for a company that burns $5 billion or more a year to make a product that destroys our environment for a product yet to find any real meaning isn't a sign that it should get more coverage or be taken more seriously.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-13
Ed Zitron
“And yet so much of the tech industry — consumer software like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and even ChatGPT, and business software from companies like Microsoft and Slack — outright sucks, yet gets covered as if that's just "how things are."”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-13
Ed Zitron
“Whatever you may feel about ChatGPT, the coverage it receives is outsized compared to its actual utility and the things built on top of it, and that's a direct result of a media industry that seems incapable of holding the powerful accountable.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-13
Ed Zitron
“Covering Meta, Twitter, Google, OpenAI and other huge tech companies as if the products they make are remarkable and perfect is disrespectful to readers and a disgusting abdication of responsibility, as their products are, even when they're functional, significantly worse, more annoying, more frustrating and more convoluted than ever”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-10
Gary Marcus
“As I wrote yesterday (and first noted back in April), I strongly suspect that, contra Altman, we have in fact reached a point of diminishing returns for pure scaling.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-10
Gary Marcus
“If the rumor is verified, there could be the AI equivalent of a bank run.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-10
Gary Marcus
“Just adding data and compute and training longer worked miracles for a while, but those days may well be over.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-09
Gary Marcus
“Reliable, trustworthy AI is surely achievable, but we may need to go back to the drawing board to get there.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-09
Gary Marcus
“When everyone realizes this, the financial bubble may burst quickly; even NVidia might take a hit, when people realize the extent to which its valuation was based on a false premise.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-09
Gary Marcus
“If LLMs won’t get the US to trustworthy AI, and our adversaries invest in alternative approaches, we could easily be outfoxed.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-09
Gary Marcus
“The economics are likely to be grim.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-09
Gary Marcus
“But that place may be smaller; it is entirely possible that LLMs on their own will never live up to last year’s wild expectations.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-09
Gary Marcus
“LLMs will not disappear, even if improvements diminish, but the economics will likely never make sense: additional training is expensive, the more scaling, the more costly.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-09
Gary Marcus
“The US has been putting all its AI eggs in the LLM basket, and that may well prove to be an epic, massive mistake.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-01
Ed Zitron
“Third, lines of code is an absolute dogshit metric.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-11-01
Ed Zitron
“Yet to actively encourage the company-wide dilution of performance reviews — and by extension the lives of Microsoft employees — by introducing generative AI is reprehensible.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-10-30
Gary Marcus
“Any serious scientist or engineer knows you can’t possibly predict the future with that kind of precision, especially when there are so many unknowns.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-10-30
Gary Marcus
“To sweeten it all, they get free press for all these outlandish claims, and that drives up the whole thing.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-10-30
Gary Marcus
“Nor should they take anything that he or Son said yesterday seriously.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-10-30
Gary Marcus
“It’s a made up round number, with no real meaning; pure hype.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-10-30
Gary Marcus
“That’s why so many investors working with other people’s money love plausible stories with big numbers.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-10-30
Gary Marcus
“There is just no way that we can predict all this out to 2040 with any certainty.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-10-30
Gary Marcus
“As I put it on X last night, quantitative vibes are still just vibes.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-10-30
Gary Marcus
“In my opinion the audience of investors at the forum was being lied to: they were being assured that everything in the field of AI is under control and well plotted out when in fact science is hard and the field is in its infancy.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-10-23
Gary Marcus
“The mere belief in this narrative with respect to AGI could motivate profoundly destabilizing actions, like a nuclear first-strike.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-10-23
Gary Marcus
“For now, I’ll just say that we should be very wary of letting science guys with toy models of the world dictate international relations.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-10-23
Gary Marcus
“His departure is yet another sign that OpenAI, as we knew it, is dead.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-10-23
Gary Marcus
“However, it’s hard not to think that the timing of his exit might have something to do with the recent reports that OpenAI is trying to restructure as a for-profit public benefit corporation (PBC) as a condition of keeping the $6.6 billion it just raised in its latest funding round.”
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid 2024-10-23
Gary Marcus
“We can and should instead approach the challenge of safely building AGI as one of global, rather than national security.”