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

Unresolved claims, page 15 of 20

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

Unresolved claims (1958)

The record was checked, and the evidence available by the cutoff does not settle it. Forecasts whose deadline has not arrived are listed apart, as not yet due.

Page 15 of 20: claims 1401 to 1500 of 1958, ordered by the date first said, newest first. To find a claim by its words, use search.

  1. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “And because OpenAI (and the competition) are so deep in the hole with transformer-based models, I believe they will continue to drive billions into them, burning money on training them using data that may or may not have been legally acquired”

  2. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “It would require a way of expanding what OpenAI can sell to address the entirety of corporate America, which would require use cases that I do not believe generative AI is capable of meeting, like automating chunks of the economy rather than bankrupting freelance designers and copy-editors.”

  3. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “As a result, expectations are higher of what future generations of GPT might do, making it inevitable that the company will disappoint investors and customers.”

  4. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “here’s the crux of the matter: generative AI is a product with no mass-market utility - at least on the scale of truly revolutionary movements like the original cloud computing and smartphone booms - and it’s one that costs an eye-watering amount to build and run.”

  5. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “I am simply saying that for OpenAI to grow to the $10+ billion revenue a year it needs to survive, it would need to replace entire chunks of the labor force.”

  6. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Raise either multiple rounds, or the largest funding round ever raised by any company, and then have to keep doing so in perpetuity.”

  7. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “I see no signs that the transformer-based architecture can do significantly more than it currently does.”

  8. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “If it succeeds — which I add would require potentially entirely new branches of psychology and mathematics to do so, as we humans barely understand our brains — that would be a huge technological achievement that still wouldn't turn things around.”

  9. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “though I believe OpenAI's continued existence is necessary to keep companies interested/invested in the industry at all.”

  10. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Conversely, OpenAI has devoured no monopoly, and the product category it created — the only one it is really part of — is one entirely subsidized by venture capital and Microsoft.”

  11. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “People are starting to realize all of the above.”

  12. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “That said, I am certain that the impending collapse won’t lead to the absolute death of AI. There is too much at stake.”

  13. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “There can be no path to AGI without neurosymbolic AI.”

  14. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Nobody has a moat”

  15. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “The neural network approach known as generative AI — especially its poster chatbot ChatGPT – has captured the world’s imagination, but will soon flame out.”

  16. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “So for the most part, we’ve been stuck in a world in which all the major tech companies are building exactly the same thing (bigger and bigger LLMs based on more data), achieving almost exactly the same results (a passel of GPT-4 level models, hardly different from each other, all struggling with hallucinations and boneheaded errors), and hardly any investment in anything else.”

  17. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “There is no killer app”

  18. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “The biggest intrinsic failings of generative AI have to do with reliability, in a way that I believe can never be solved, given their inherent nature.”

  19. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Long-term adoption (vs mere experimentation) has been modest, there is no significantly better tech now than there was in January; GPT-5 is still a no show.”

  20. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Customers can easily switch to other providers, almost anytime they want, and for month there had been more and more alternatives, including Anthropic and Google, at more and more attractive prices, forcing OpenAI itself to cut prices just a few days ago.”

  21. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “LLMs have just became exactly the commodity I predicted they would become, at the lowest possible price.”

  22. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Obviously, their only hope is to raise more cash, and they will certainly try.”

  23. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Because right now the thing I've been on about with generative AI is on top of not being super useful, it's so unprofitable.”

  24. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “And leaving more and more code writing to generative AI, which grasps syntax but not meaning, as a new benchmark from Stephen Wolfram shows, is not the answer, either.”

  25. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “As these organizations push their engineers harder, said engineers will turn to AI-generated code, poisoning codebases with insecure and buggy code as companies shed staff to keep up with Wall Street’s demands in ways that I’m not sure people are capable of understanding.”

  26. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “they're allowed to get away from the very obvious problem: that Large Language Models are peaking, will not solve the kind of complex problems that actually matter, and OpenAI (and other LLM companies) are being allowed to accumulate money and power in a way that's allowed them to do actual damage in broad daylight.”

  27. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “The media seems nigh-on incapable of accepting that generative AI is a big, stupid, costly and environmentally-destructive bubble, to the point that they'll happily accept marketing slop and vague platitudes about how big something that's already here will be in the future based on a remarkable lack of proof.”

  28. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “The problem with stories like this is that they suggest that OpenAI is working on Artificial General Intelligence, or something that left unchecked could somehow destroy society, as opposed to what it’s actually working on — increasingly faster iterations of a Large Language Model that's absolutely not going to do that.”

  29. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “The problem is that these pieces aren’t about breakthroughs — they’re marketing collateral dressed up as technological progress, superficially-exciting yet hollow on the inside, which almost feels a little too on the nose.”

  30. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “I guarantee you Anthropic, Google and Meta are all working on something doing exactly the same thing, because what they are describing is something that limits every single Large Language Model due to the very nature of how they’re built, something Reuters even acknowledges by adding that “this is something that has eluded AI models to date.””

  31. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “While there's tons of evidence that they're impossible to fix, surely a safety-minded culture would be one that sought to fix or mitigate the most obvious and dangerous problem of Large Language Models.”

  32. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “In essence, on top of generative AI not having any killer apps, not meaningfully increasing productivity or GDP, not generating any revenue, not creating new jobs or massively changing existing industries, it also requires America to totally rebuild its power grid, which Janous regrettably adds the US has kind of forgotten how to do.”

  33. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “I see no situation where OpenAI and Anthropic continue to iterate on Large Language Models in perpetuity, as at some point Microsoft, Amazon and Google decide (or are forced to decide) that cloud compute welfare isn't a business model.”

  34. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Basically, there's going to be a moment that spooks a venture capital firm into pushing one of its startups to sell, or the sudden, unexpected yet very obvious collapse of a major player.”

  35. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “All of this excitement, every second of breathless hype has been built on this idea that the artificial intelligence industry – led by generative AI – will somehow revolutionize everything from robotics to the supply chain, despite the fact that generative AI is not actually going to solve these problems because it isn't built to do so.”

  36. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “The reason I'm suddenly bringing up superintelligences — or AGI (artificial general intelligence) — is because throughout every defense of generative AI is a deliberate attempt to get around the problem that generative AI doesn't really automate many tasks.”

  37. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Generative AI, as I said back in March, is peaking, if it hasn't already peaked.”

  38. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “The jobs market isn't going to change because of generative AI, because generative AI can't actually do many jobs, and it's mediocre at the few things that it's capable of doing.”

  39. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Or, put another way, each additional step becomes increasingly (and exponentially) more expensive to take.”

  40. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “It's been eighteen months since this bubble inflated, and since then very little has actually happened involving technology doing new stuff, just an iterative exploration of the very clear limits of what an AI model that generates answers can produce, with the answer being "something that is, at times, sort of good."”

  41. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Yet, I have a counterpoint: no it doesn't.”

  42. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “While it's a useful efficiency tool, said efficiency is based off of a technology that is extremely expensive, and I believe that at some point AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI will have to increase prices — or begin to collapse under the weight of a technology that has no path to profitability.”

  43. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “even if their models are all extremely similar, as they’re all trained on the same quickly-dwindling amount of training data.”

  44. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “They don’t care that the output is mediocre, that the product is unprofitable, that there is a quickly-approaching wall that generative AI can’t leap over as it runs out of training data, or that the transformer-based architecture of Large Language Models has hard limitations that are impossible to overcome.”

  45. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “The deep poison of the Shareholder Supremacy — the nihilistic intention of contorting companies to please analysts and investors — is one that will uniquely punish the tech industry, just like it did to General Electric.”

  46. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Google, Microsoft and Meta have bet their futures on generative AI, cramming it into their products with little regard for utility, all to show the markets that they’re futuristic rocket ship growth companies”

  47. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Microsoft is run by Satya Nadella, another MBA that has, in his tenure, overseen layoffs of over 30,000 people, and pushed his company deep into the deeply unprofitable and unsustainable world of generative AI.”

  48. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Neurosymbolic AI has long been an underdog; in the end I expect it to come from behind and be essential.”

  49. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “The markers that our next President puts down—about how much liability and responsibility companies will have, and about how the government keeps up with a rapidly changing technology— will have lasting impact.”

  50. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Returns are starting to diminish.”

  51. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “With the truth that LLMs can’t be trusted now becoming more widely known, the big AI leaders have switched their focus to long term promises that are impossible to verify and even more grandiose than “we can help your business in unprecedented ways” (which has turned out to be mostly untrue).”

  52. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “In case you haven’t noticed, GPT-5 has come to seem to be a little like that. People keep on trying project its arrival, and its arrival keeps on slippin’ into the future.”

  53. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Nobody to my knowledge has kept systematic track of the predictions, but I took a quick and somewhat random look at X and had no trouble finding many predictions, going back to 2023, almost always optimistic.”

  54. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Yet Apple’s deal doesn’t even appear to pay OpenAI for using ChatGPT, meaning that OpenAI’s deal will immediately lose them money from the second iOS 18 launches.”

  55. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Others are bailing now, too. Or at least trying to subtly alter their positions, committing less to the unrealistic.”

  56. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “LLMs are not AGI, and (on their own) never will be; scaling alone was never going to be enough.”

  57. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Generative artificial intelligence is not going to become the incredible supercomputer that Altman has regularly promised.”

  58. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “When the deck of cards collapses, he’ll find something to blame it on — market forces, a lack of energy breakthroughs, or “unfortunate economic forces” — and remain a billionaire capable of doing anything he wants.”

  59. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “He will push OpenAI to grow and sell into as many industries as possible, a specious hype-man selling to other specious hype-men desperate to connect their company to an AI bubble inflated by Altman himself.”

  60. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Anyone who can afford that can easily fill out some paperwork and run a few tests, just like I can pay a few bucks to get a driver’s license. It’s the least they can do.”

  61. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Every company that would be subject to the stronger set of regulations is valued in the billions.”

  62. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “It can do some things better, some worse, very few reliably.”

  63. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “The double Y-axis makes no sense, and presupposes its own conclusion.”

  64. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “In 2019 I pointed out through a series of examples on Twitter with GPT-2 that LLMs were subject to essentially the same critique: greedy with respect to data, uninterpretable, unreliable as reasoners, subject to hallucinations, etc, that they lacked world models (“they don't develop robust representations of *how events unfold over time*), and that they would be inadequate on their own.”

  65. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Nowadays we both (unlike many other people) stress the absolutely essential nature of common sense, physical reasoning and world models, and the failure of current architectures to handle those well.”

  66. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “They both went through yCombinator, and both of them have sold products that don't do what they said it would based on what it might do in the future.”

  67. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “The Rot-Com bubble will inevitably pop, but until it does, billions will be plowed into building hardware and software to inflate the Rot-Com bubble in the hopes that the growth-at-all-costs party will never end.”

  68. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Generative AI is not going to change the world, and while artificial intelligence itself might, it isn't going to do so in the hands of Sam Altman and OpenAI, or Anthropic.”

  69. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “The answer is simple: it isn't coming.”

  70. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Worse, we are no closer to a solution to the alignment problem now than we were then.”

  71. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “But OpenAI has been and continues to be a California-registered 501(3)(c) nonprofit, pledged not to profits, but to humanity – and still getting tax-exempt status on the basis of their promise to deploy AI safely:”

  72. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “The 3.5 API (geared towards programmers as a backend tool) was available beforehand, but that’s not of course the consumer-directed product with gimmicks like word-by-word typing to give a false impression of humanness that ultimately went viral.”

  73. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Fundamentally, the essay attacks a strawman, viz. that the firing of Altman was somehow precipitated by an immediate safety concern), thereby diverting from the board’s actual, stated concern (candor).”

  74. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “And oops, Grok’s basic understanding of time is shaky, too:”

  75. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Musk is just building bigger and bigger LLMs, and Meta is mostly (despite LeCun’s reservations) mostly doing the same.”

  76. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “I believe, as crazy as it sounds, that this strategy will lead to the contraction and eventual death of Facebook, and anticipate that as things get difficult for the company, Instagram will begin to decay in a similar way.”

  77. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Zuckerberg has blown over $40 billion dollars on the metaverse so far, and seems to be intent on doing the same with generative AI, sinking further billions into expensive graphics processing units and other assorted hardware to spin up features that nobody asked for or wanted.”

  78. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Yet by incentivizing as much content and as many interactions as possible rather than curating the experience in any way is slowly killing Facebook.”

  79. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Regulatory capture is the default, as Karla Ortiz recently noted,::”

  80. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “OpenAI promised to devote 20% of its efforts to AI safety, but never delivered, according to a recent report by Jeremy Kahn at Fortune.”

  81. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “But lately, he and they have made a lot of mistakes, and broken a lot of promises.”

  82. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “By clustering piles of similar things together in a giant n-dimensional space, they pretty much automatically become synonym and pastische machines, regurgitating a lot of words with slight paraphrases while adding conceptually little, and understanding even less.”

  83. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “It’s a pattern.”

  84. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “I probably don’t have to tell you, but that’s complete bullshit. And stupid, obviously refuted bullshit at that.”

  85. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “They said it wasn’t intentional, but of course it was.”

  86. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “I can’t tell you what happened to Sam’s caps lock, but obviously the claim that the resemblance to ScarJo was a “coincidence” was a lie. Sam knew perfectly well what the character sounded like.”

  87. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Just so we are abundantly, painfully, earnestly clear here, OpenAI lied to the media multiple times.”

  88. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Lots of quirky errors are already being reported, same as ever, like this reasoning error from Jane Rosenzweig:”

  89. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “They don’t have GPT-5 after 14 months of trying.”

  90. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “AI agents are error-prone, and the likelihood of failure in an automated task like moving a calendar invite or ordering an Uber is exponentially higher and less tolerable in a consumer setting.”

  91. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “and he still can’t get past any of these very obvious problems, partly because he isn’t technical and thus can’t really solve any of the problems himself, and partly because the problems he’s facing are burdened by the laws of mathematics and physics.”

  92. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “To make Sora kind of useful, OpenAI will have to find a way to dramatically increase the precision of prompts, reduce hallucinations to almost nothing, and vastly increase processing power across the board.”

  93. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Generative AI is extremely expensive because even the simplest prompts require GPT-4 to run highly-complex mathematical equations on GPUs that cost $10,000 apiece.”

  94. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Sora’s attempts to replace filmmakers are dead on arrival because these are impractical and ineffective solutions to problems that nobody complained about other than Hollywood executives.”

  95. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “If, say, Uber changes the layout of its website, or changes the flow of certain actions (like booking a cab, or changing the pickup location), it would effectively break that entire part of the service.”

  96. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “While Rabbit has tens of millions of dollars of venture funding, Rabbit’s business is about as functional as the R1, and I would bet money that it finds a way to try to charge its 100,000 or so customers some sort of subscription fee to stay afloat, just after the single most conspicuous tech reviewer called it “barely reviewable.””

  97. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “It has a right to about 49% of a for-profit subsidiary of OpenAI’s profits, up until a very complex point that may require litigation to resolve, but the for-profit hasn’t made any profits, and the for-profit is owned by a non-profit.”

  98. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Lyu — and, for that matter, Rabbit/Cyber Manufacture Co. — has failed to be transparent with its customers, the press, and the public writ large. And yet he demands an unbelievable amount of faith from users of the Rabbit R1, who must provide their usernames and passwords for any service they wish to connect to the device by remotely connecting into a virtual machine and typing them.”

  99. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Usership for ChatGPT rose like a rocket until May 2023 but has more or less stabilized since then without significant further growth.”

  100. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “He seems like such a nice guy, yet he implies, unrealistically, that the solution to AGI is within his grasp; he presents no evidence that is so, and rarely considers the many critiques of current approaches that have been raised.”