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

Claims that can’t be checked, page 7 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 7 of 37: claims 601 to 700 of 3690, ordered by the date first said, newest first. To find a claim by its words, use search.

  1. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Anthropic once again played the media like a fiddle. And so many folks ate it all up.”

  2. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Anthropic has a chance of being profitable, but reaching 10x the IPO price would be amazing.”

  3. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “AI is not profitable yet, and may never be.”

  4. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “GenAI is a risky bet that could pay off, or it could well tank the economy.”

  5. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “I have to think that anyone who buys the SpaceX IPO just isn’t that good at math. Or history.”

  6. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “OpenAI is in trouble, and may not make it.”

  7. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “OpenAI is in trouble, and may not make it.”

  8. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “If there is a boost in productivity, we will perhaps see it first in coding, but 2.7x relative to the entire economy is an enormous ask.”

  9. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Those excited about generative AI are either the victim or the perpetrator of a con centered around a technology to ingratiate at the highest cost possible.”

  10. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “One of my sources has come forward and brought me a story that will possibly burst the AI bubble.”

  11. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Sidenote: Amazon and Meta barely have AI stories.”

  12. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “I think that’s by design. AI labs want their costs to be high so that they can continue growing at ridiculous rates, all so that they can keep feeding money to their hyperscaler compute partners who then invest that money right back into them, creating further reasons to keep buying NVIDIA GPUs, so that NVIDIA can then invest that money back into either AI compute providers (who OpenAI and Anthropic pay) or the AI labs themselves.”

  13. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “These are signs that AI’s revenue growth is slowing, and it’s likely going to slow further, because we currently live in an era where Anthropic and OpenAI are straight-up abusing its clients, providing limited-to-no visibility into spend, per the Wall Street Journal:”

  14. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “OpenAI expects to spend $50 billion on compute in 2026, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Anthropic spends anywhere from $30 billion to $50 billion.”

  15. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “But you could make similar graphs in many domains: loads of nominal productivity, but not much real world impact.”

  16. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “The graphs from FT and The Washington Post show the same thing over and over; we are being flooded with AI-generated content, from apps to music to scientific papers, but that doesn’t make any of it any good. Most of it (in fairness, not all) isn’t.”

  17. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “But all too often that content — created by a giant but unreliable word prediction machine that is more regurgitative than innovative — is of little lasting value.”

  18. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Most of it is slop (and in some cases work slop):”

  19. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Maybe the biggest exception is coding, but even there, it’s not yet clear how many of the systems that have been created with the help of agentic coding will endure.”

  20. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “It could well be that once the providers (Open AI, Anthropic, Cursor, etc) attempt to charge enough money to cover their losses, the cost of AI could become more expensive than the humans it is replacing.”

  21. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Talk about digging holes without creating real value.”

  22. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “It’s hard even to say how the chip companies are doing, once you factor out all the circular financing and shrinking cash flow.”

  23. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “It is very likely that the same thing is happening in math.”

  24. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “The new cold war will be about AI.”

  25. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “(And Google might perhaps be wise not to accept Trump’s proffered investment, given how much of their income is global; OpenAI may be so desperate they have no choice.)”

  26. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “(And Google might perhaps be wise not to accept Trump’s proffered investment, given how much of their income is global; OpenAI may be so desperate they have no choice.)”

  27. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “I doubt Friday was as bad as it will get, so the title of this essay (“AI’s Black Friday”) is a bit tongue in cheek.”

  28. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Bailing out OpenAI is crony socialism and corruption (remember those $25M donations from Greg Brockman and his wife?), preventing capitalism from taking its natural course.”

  29. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “I have no idea whether Monday’s market will continue the downward trends we saw Friday. But it should.”

  30. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “This year, SpaceX’s AI division is leasing GPUs left, right, and center, because they can’t figure out what to do with them.”

  31. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Who can forget the hapless Meta, which may ultimately win the prize for most money burned vs least results?”

  32. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Instead, they want people to talk about an “option” they don’t actually plan to take, and are unlikely to ever take.”

  33. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “(More likely, they will like always hint at China, and continue rush ahead.)”

  34. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “They *don’t* actually want a pause - at least for now.”

  35. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “A faster coding tool will probably not end the world.”

  36. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “So we don’t need to panic yet.”

  37. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “The blog, which shows considerable advances in the ability of their systems to write code, is interesting, and make an argument for slowing down AI research that should be considered.”

  38. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “AGI is *harder* than “recursive self improvement” [RSI]”

  39. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Pure deep learning has largely hit a wall; neurosymbolic AI is rescuing it.”

  40. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “May any such oversight be bipartisan, and in the interest of American citizens, and in the interests of humanity as a whole.”

  41. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Number one on my list was preflight checks, similar to the FDA review for drugs, for models with large commercial impact:”

  42. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Timing when all this might fall apart is hard, but the economics don’t make sense, and more and more people are starting to notice.”

  43. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “What is most upsetting though, is how retail investors and retirement funds are likely to be taken advantage of in all of this.”

  44. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “The only way to inflate the AI bubble both on a hardware and software level was to mislead the general public and investors on the costs and efficacy of AI models.”

  45. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Nevertheless, the threat of AI job loss has been enough to allow both Sam Altman and Dario Amodei to raise hundreds of billions of dollars lying about it”

  46. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “They didn’t raise hundreds of billions of dollars by talking about any product currently on the market, and that’s because the current products are not very good products.”

  47. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “In fact, I’d be willing to believe that AI had a negative economic impact, increasing operating expenses across the board and giving some software engineers prompt-based concussions by automating some coding in a way that makes them lazy and bad at writing software”

  48. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Anthropic, OpenAI and every other AI company deliberately obfuscated these costs because they knew that the second a user actually had to pay for the fuckups of an AI model they’d scream like they were being stung to death by bees.”

  49. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Every different prompt and project and interaction can go wrong in a way that is hard to predict or plan for other than having an eternal vigilance that the supposed “intelligence” doesn’t do something catastrophically stupid, because LLMs have no thoughts, consciousness or ability to learn outside of pre and post-training.”

  50. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “These users — much like the users of effectively every subsidized AI subscription — never really knew how much anything they did cost, because Microsoft intentionally hid the actual cost of prompts and allowed users to spend obscene amounts as a way of boosting growth for GitHub Copilot.”

  51. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “I realize I’m painting with a broad brush, so let me get a broader one: I believe anyone who relies on LLMs for anything is a mark.”

  52. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “That fact AI companies backed by the full manufactured consent of the markets and most of the economy still had to subsidize their products shows exactly how flimsy their value truly is.”

  53. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “This shit needs to work every time without fail and be absolutely flawless and autonomous.”

  54. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Sam Altman’s comments about “intelligence too cheap to meter” were lies.”

  55. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “LLM researchers are NOT creating beings.”

  56. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Claude’s outputs are the product of a form of mimicry, rather than as a report of genuine internal states.”

  57. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Consciousness is about internal states; the mimicry, no matter how rich, proves very little.”

  58. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “You can’t just look at the outputs, without investigating the underlying mechanisms, and conclude that two entities with similar outputs reach those similar outputs by similar means.”

  59. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “a. That’s the very Eliza illusion I am pointing out. It is possible to fool people into seeing things that aren’t real (e.g., pareidolia, and”

  60. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “And Hinton should know better.”

  61. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “A month later, it already looks like the moment has passed; tokenmaxxing may have jacked up Anthropic’s second quarter, but it looks like it won’t last.”

  62. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “The second sentence— “Tokens got burned for millions of dollars without any real significant ROI to show for it” – might well turn out to be the epitaph for an era.”

  63. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “And it could get worse, if tokenmaxxing is indeed a fad whose time has already begun to pass.”

  64. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Tokenmaxxing is stupid.”

  65. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “A lot of banks may take a hint as well.”

  66. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “While I’m not saying every LLM user is an imbecile, they’re built to convince the mediocre and incurious that they’re remarkable, and it turns out that a great many of them run venture capital firms and Fortune 500 companies.”

  67. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “I don’t think LLMs, as a tool, are a grift. There are use cases, though those use cases are miniscule compared to the egregious promises and extrapolations made by the majority of the media and the executive sect, and absolutely nothing about them warrants the amount of money invested in them.”

  68. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “And they want you to do that because they’re losing.”

  69. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Anthropic is either the single-most successful grifter of all time or speed-running a con where it fudges together numbers to raise endless amounts of money to keep its billion-dollar burn going.”

  70. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “It is inefficient, power-intensive, environmentally destructive, and inherently sold based on things that it might do, providing far more value to scam artists and con men than it does to its end users.”

  71. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Organizations aren’t burning millions or hundreds of millions of dollars a year on AI because it’s good, they’re doing it because they are run by people who do not know what the fuck they’re doing.”

  72. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Only an economy oriented around coveting and coddling losers would have let AI get this far.”

  73. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “That’s because underneath the puffery and the propaganda and the pervasive sense of inevitability, the AI industry is losing. Anthropic and OpenAI’s revenue growth is only possible thanks to a near-perpetual misinformation campaign that overstates both the current and future capabilities of LLMs, and a near-society-wide ignorance at the executive level.”

  74. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “This is what an industry does when it’s in distinct, existential distress.”

  75. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “LLMs were meant to be the thing that replaced all workers, but the actual outputs and outcomes don’t seem to be resulting in anything changing other than lots of things becoming worse or more-expensive.”

  76. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “It’s very likely that Dario Amodei and Sam Altman’s plan is to keep burning money until somebody who works for them comes up with a way not to, and in the interim their plan is to get as many users as they can to keep raising money.”

  77. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “And yet none of it’s really working, because Business Idiots don’t really know how anything works.”

  78. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “AI is a perfect storm of failed concepts and organizations, and the apex of the Era of the Business Idiot, an epoch where we’re ruled by people so thoroughly disconnected from the actual workforce that it was inevitable that a technology would be created specifically to grift them.”

  79. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “No CEO that talks of a theoretical future as a means of selling you software in the present should be trusted. No technology that makes mistakes with regularity should be defended.”

  80. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “There is no other plan. They do not have a secret invention coming. They do not have AGI in a box in their office.”

  81. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “These men have no other hypergrowth ideas, and are more willing to annihilate their cashflows and dominate the Earth with half-finished data centers than to admit that their core businesses will eventually decline.”

  82. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “In a rational society, Salesforce’s stock would take a beating and the SEC would open an immediate and brutal investigation.”

  83. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Same logic may well apply to the upcoming IPOs of OpenAI and Anthropic.”

  84. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “If you have a mutual fund and don’t want a significant part of your holdings to flip essentially automatically into speculative, not yet proven big tech plays like SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic, you might want to call your congressperson ASAP to complain about this rule, and the risks it could pose to your retirement.”

  85. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “I’ve also speculated that the reason why OpenAI has favored this metric is because it’s easy to manipulate.”

  86. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “If I had to guess, it’s likely that investors have begun to demand firmer, more “real company”-adjacent numbers, and while Anthropic was able to find a clever way to manipulate them as a means of raising funding, OpenAI was forced to share numbers a little closer to reality.”

  87. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Perhaps that’s why OpenAI is rushing to go public - it realizes it might have tapped out private investors.”

  88. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “While OpenAI brought in a billion dollars more than Anthropic in Q1 2026, The Information couldn’t get ahold of OpenAI’s numbers for Q2 2026, but at $45 billion in ARR - $3.75 billion in a month - Anthropic may have taken the lead.”

  89. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Nevertheless, while this represents an improvement over the 2.583% rate in February of last year, it’s likely improved as a result of cheaper ad-supported ChatGPT “Go” subscribers at $5 or $8 a month, depending on geography.”

  90. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “The exact number is not given but that discount may well be bigger than the projected $559M profit.”

  91. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Caveat emptor, IPO buyers.”

  92. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Clearly impressive. But as with so much else, it should be viewed with skepticism.”

  93. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Context matters, and it is unclear whether subsequent quarters will be profitable.”

  94. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “For large enterprises, Anthropic is taking prepayment of tokens —-- say, $50 million intended to be spread over 12 months that it takes in as revenue.This would both inflate revenue numbers and depress costs, because Anthropic wouldn’t have actually provided the compute necessary to earn that revenue yet.”

  95. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “If Anthropic paid full-rate for its compute in those two months, its economics would shift back to what they’ve always been per my reporting from last year on its AWS costs — a business that has costs that linearly increase with its revenue growth.”

  96. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “There’s also a very compelling argument that Anthropic’s costs will increase and will eat up that profitability, to once again quote the Wall Street Journal:”

  97. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Anthropic timed this leak to focus on a specific quarter where it artificially suppressed costs, and gave you the flimsiest proof imaginable, specifically-crafted for you to share it as a triumph and spread the idea that “AI labs are actually profitable,” when their core economics haven’t changed.”

  98. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “I will give Dario Amodei credit: nobody does financial engineering and a press-led information war better than Anthropic.”

  99. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Anthropic could have ratcheted down training to ease the burden on its infrastructure to provide inference.”

  100. Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Anthropic could be front-loading annual commitments of any kind —– subscriptions to Claude, enterprise or team agreements, and so on.”