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

Unresolved claims, page 7 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 7 of 20: claims 601 to 700 of 1958, ordered by the date first said, newest first. To find a claim by its words, use search.

  1. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “They are guaranteeing that their software will be poorly-written and maintained, all in the pursuit of “doing more AI” for no reason other than that everybody else appears to be doing so.”

  2. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “By the time they actually get all the Blackwells in Vera Rubin will be two years old!”

  3. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Nevertheless, based on these data points, I’m comfortable estimating that North American data center absorption — as the IT load of data centers actually turned on and in operation — was at around 3GW for 2025, which would work out to about 3.9GW of total power.”

  4. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “NVIDIA’s overall data center segment revenue was $195.7 billion, which puts America’s data center purchases at around $135 billion, leaving around $44 billion of GPUs and associated technology uninstalled.”

  5. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Then there’s the very, very obvious scandal that NVIDIA, the largest company on the stock market, is making hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue on chips that aren’t being installed.”

  6. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “All Nebius had to do to raise $3.75 billion in debt was to sign a deal with Meta for data center capacity that doesn’t exist and will likely take three to four years to build (it’s never happening).”

  7. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “With the acceleration of NVIDIA’s GPU sales, it now takes about 6 months to install and operationalize a single quarter’s worth of sales.”

  8. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “The flippancy with which the media reports on these data centers — both in the structure of the deals and the realities of the construction (I go into detail about this in a premium from late last year, but making data centers is hard) — is allowing con artists to get rich and creating the conditions for yet another great financial crisis.”

  9. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “This sounds sarcastic — petty even! — but it’s the truth, and nobody’s margins appear to be improving.”

  10. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “To be explicit, allowing LLM to write all of your code means that you are no longer developing code, nor are you learning how to develop code, nor are you going to become a better software engineer as a result.”

  11. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Despite everybody talking about it endlessly for three god damn years, LLMs lack the kind of obvious, replicable, industrially-necessary outcomes that make a 3x, 4x or 10x price increase tenable.”

  12. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “AI is not actually driving much revenue at all!”

  13. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “In any case, there is no future for any AI company that uses a subscription-based approach, at least not one where they don’t directly pass on the cost of compute.”

  14. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “In the end, I bet Stargate Abilene never gets built, but if it does, I’d be shocked if it’s done before the middle of 2027, which would mean it takes about 3 years per Gigawatt of power, or about a year per 293MW of IT load.”

  15. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Saying obvious stuff like “every AI company is unprofitable” or “there is no path to profitability” or “nobody is talking about AI revenues” is considered unfair or cynical or contrarian, even though these are very reasonable and logical statements grounded in reality.”

  16. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “This means it will be very, very difficult to increase subscription costs on users, and near-impossible to convince them to pay the cost of the API.”

  17. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Even if you are impressed by what LLMs can do, remember that what you’re impressed by is the result of burning more money than anybody has ever burned on anything, including the Great Financial Crisis’ Troubled Asset Relief Plan (a little over $400 billion) and the COVID Paycheck Protection Program (somewhere between $800 billion and $900 billion).”

  18. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Anthropic made $5 billion in its entire existence in revenue and spent $10 billion just on compute.”

  19. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Another dramatic sign of changing times: Sam Altman, who ridiculed my 2022 critique of LLMs that argued that scaling would not bring us to AGI and that we would need architectures has just argued that”

  20. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Note that in this talk Altman didn’t claim to have found such an architecture. That represents a significant retrenchment from his claim fourteen months ago that “We now know how to build AGI as it’s usually understood.””

  21. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “AI is supposed to change all that. But so far it hasn’t.”

  22. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Over and over we discover drugs with AI that work on trials in animals but not safely enough in humans; we just don’t understand biology well enough.”

  23. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “And thanks to an affidavit from Anthropic Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao filed as part of Anthropic’s suit against the Department of Defense’s supply chain risk designation, it’s clear that the deception was intentional, as the affidavit confirmed that Anthropic’s lifetime revenue “to date” (referring to March 9th 2026) is $5 billion, and it has spent $10 billion on inference and training.”

  24. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “There are many signs that the past no longer makes sense. The collapse of SaaS (which I’ll cover in this week’s premium), the collapse of the business models of both venture capital and private equity”

  25. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Apocalyptic talk is a special case of hype, Sam and Dario both play that card over and over, basically amounting to saying “our tech is so scary it might ruin society, so give us more money so we can make that tech ever faster.””

  26. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Both, for example, have endlessly hinted that AGI is near, and just quietly moved the deadline back when they didn’t deliver.”

  27. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Millions of people, literally, are angry; many feel betrayed.”

  28. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Essentially anyone who uses a chatbot is at risk.”

  29. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Sure you can say “it’s projections,” but there is a clear attempt to use the media to misinform investors and the general public. For example, OpenAI claimed SoftBank would spend $3bn a year on agents in 2025. That never happened!”

  30. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “OpenAI and AI companies are not a ponzi scheme. There’s real revenues, people are paying it money.”

  31. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Nevertheless, Dario Amodei gets fawning press about being a patriot that deeply cares about safety less than a week after Anthropic dropped its safety pledge to not train an AI system unless it could guarantee in advance that its safety measures were accurate.”

  32. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “There are members of the media who defend OpenAI saying that “these are annualized figures,” but OpenAI does not state that, because OpenAI loves to lie.”

  33. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Stop Reporting That It Raised $110bn, It Is Factually Incorrect”

  34. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “What I’m trying to get at is that OpenAI (and, for that matter, Anthropic) has spent the last two years increasingly obfuscating the truth through leak after leak to the media.”

  35. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “But the biggest thing to take away from this is that one of the classic arguments against my work is that “costs will just come down,” but the costs never come down.”

  36. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Based on my own reporting, which has been ignored (I guess it’s easier to do that than think about it?) by much of the press, OpenAI made $4.33bn through the end of September, and spent $8.67bn on inference in that period.”

  37. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Forgive me for being cynical about something from Sam fucking Altman, but I just don’t trust the guy, and this is an (as of writing this sentence) unsigned contract with bus-sized loopholes.”

  38. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “we’re at around $37bn — leaving OpenAI with about…$20bn in cash at the end of the year.”

  39. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “The Department of Defense had agreed to terms around not using Claude for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous killing machines (the former of which it’s not particularly good at and the latter of which it flat out cannot do)”

  40. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “software is not as simple as spitting out code, neither is it able to automatically clone the SaaS experience.”

  41. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “It has made dodgy companies that gave lip service to AI safety tremendously wealthy —on the promise, not yet delivered—that they could create AGI.”

  42. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “And made governments so covetous of this stuff that was allegedly like AGI that they have taken it by force.”

  43. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “And led governments to start using today’s manifestly unreliable tech in the context of war.”

  44. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “the immediate problems of LLMs from cybercrime to misinformation to nonconsensual deepfake porn tend to be underplayed, because unrealistic melodrama sucks away attention.”

  45. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “By proclaiming that LLMs would change the world, and that they would do so imminently, doomers contributed to the growth of the LLM companies (essentially free publicity) and to the White House thinking LLMs were critical to the survival of the nation.”

  46. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “the point being that doomers, especially those who have screamed that AGI is nigh, have wanted to slow AI acceleration (at least until we could make AI safe) and instead have only accelerated it.”

  47. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Some will cost lives, some will cost many lives.”

  48. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Many people, perhaps thousands, maybe more, will die, needlessly.”

  49. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Worse, they did it in favor of someone else who took pretty similar terms and happened to have given more campaign contributions.”

  50. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “If anything really bad comes of pushing premature AI too hard and too fast into to the military, he will own it.”

  51. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “One thing that Noble doesn’t mention is why OpenAI has struggled to make a profit; in my eyes, there are three reasons, that I have emphasized here before: the product is unreliable (placing an upper bound on how much many people be willing to pay), it is expensive to operate, and they have no technical moat, which has led to price wars.”

  52. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “But that is exactly where we are headed.”

  53. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Hegsseth’s demand would in principle extend to apply Anthropic’s software to nuclear weapons without humans in the loop.”

  54. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “This is turning into a very involved and convoluted process! It turns out that it's pretty difficult to actually raise $100 billion.”

  55. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Let's start with the simplest, and least-technical way of putting it: even in the best-case scenario, you do not just type "Build Be A Salesforce Competitor" and it erupts, fully-formed, from your Terminal window. It is not capable of building it, but even if it were, it would need to actually be on a cloud hosting platform, and have all manner of actual customer data entered into it.”

  56. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “This is a complete and utter lie. A bald-faced lie. This is not something that Claude Code can do.”

  57. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “As I wrote about last year, NVIDIA’s diversified revenue — that’s the revenue that comes from companies that aren’t in the magnificent 7 — continues to collapse.”

  58. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “After misleading everybody that it intended to invest $100 billion in OpenAI last year (as I warned everybody about months ago, the deal never existed and is now effectively dead), NVIDIA was allegedly “close” to investing $30 billion.”

  59. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “We have absolutely no proof this happened other than Anthropic saying it, but because the media repeated it it’s now a fact.”

  60. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “This is a big problem, because OpenAI needs $655 billion in the next five years to pay all its bills, and loses billions of dollars a year.”

  61. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “Regardless, my point is that you will not just “make your own software.””

  62. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Generative AI is NOT remotely reliable enough to make life or death decisions of magnitude.”

  63. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Turns out it wasn’t, as Shira Ovide just reported:”

  64. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “I don’t know that Generative AI was literally a scam, but the people selling it have tried to sell it as if it were tantamount to artificial general intelligence, when it’s not.”

  65. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Generative AI has its uses, but it hardly surprising that most business have struggled to find return on their investment, given the massive reliability issues that continue to plaguage it.”

  66. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Across domains involving causality, value trade-offs, justification, and error monitoring, humans attend to reasons, stakes, and responsibility, whereas language models optimize for linguistic plausibility—structural fault lines between performance alignment and genuine evaluative competence (Quattrociocchi et al., 2025).”

  67. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Behavioral similarity alone therefore provides no insight into whether the underlying processes support core components of general intelligence, such as judgment, error correction, or reliable generalization.”

  68. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “We also show that recent claims (Chen et al., 2026) about putative success on AGI hinge on redefining what AGI has historically meant.”

  69. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Language models, by contrast, tended to issue confident classifications in the same cases, even when uncertainty was explicitly signaled in the input.”

  70. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “As a result, model development and data curation are optimized for benchmark success, producing systems that perform well under test conditions but degrade in real-world settings that differ only modestly from them”

  71. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “In recent years, as the financial stakes of benchmark performance have increased, systems have been trained more often directly on benchmarks (“teaching to the test”) or on synthetic data closely resembling them.”

  72. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “At the task level, analyses of workplace automation show that even state-of-the-art systems can reliably perform only a small fraction of the tasks required in typical human occupations (Eloundou et al., 2023; Felten et al., 2023), despite high scores on idealized benchmarks.”

  73. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Such claims confuse high performance on benchmarks (often gameable) with real world flexibility, which historically has been at the center of what it means to be an artificial general intelligence.”

  74. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Rumors that humanity has already achieved artificial general intelligence (AGI) have been greatly exaggerated.”

  75. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Scammers will be among the first to adopt these tools. And indeed they already have;”

  76. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Anybody’s appearance can (given sufficient data) be faked now, at any time, for almost nothing.”

  77. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “OpenAI is losing money every quarter; even by their own (optimistic) calculations, they won’t make a profit for years.”

  78. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “If the venture capital dries up, they are toast. Talent will make a beeline for competitors.”

  79. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Although there is some clear value in it, the costs are high, and relative to those costs, the revenue has been modest.”

  80. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Let me add that I do think that some form of AI will eventually actually yield the returns people were anticipating for Generative AI.”

  81. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Small wonder that they are now turning to ads.”

  82. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Nvidia’s rise was predicated on the wrong-headed idea (long critiqued in this newsletter) that scaling would bring us to AGI.”

  83. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Me, I think the merger is really a kind of bailout, to give a lot of cash to a company that is otherwise in distress.”

  84. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “The point is that when it costs pennies to coordinate a fake mob and moments to counterfeit a human identity, the public square is left wide open to attack.”

  85. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Even so-called “thinking” AI models are vulnerable to this,”

  86. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “If we require this kind of “proof-of-human” for high-reach interactions, we make it mathematically difficult and financially ruinous for one operator to secretly run ten thousand accounts.”

  87. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “One of my darkest yet on-target predictions in WIRED in December 2022, was that we would see the first chatbot-related death in 2023, perhaps by suicide.”

  88. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “OpenAI has never made a profit.”

  89. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Anthropic has started to eat a lot of OpenAI’s lunch, taking a lot of corporate customers away.”

  90. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Over the last couple years, Altman’s public credibility has steadily waned (see e.g., Karen Hao’s bestseller, and my earlier essay on Altman in The Guardian).”

  91. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Those price wars did in fact come to pass; users costs per token are roughly a hundred times lower two year later.”

  92. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “(Altman got famous hinting at the supposed miracles of GPT-5; by any reasonable measure it was both late and short of expectations.)”

  93. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “DeepSeek launched a price war that forced Altman to cut prices dramatically.”

  94. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “They still aren’t adding a lot of quantifiable value to the world:”

  95. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “A large fraction of what LLMs do is mostly just memorization (and Hinton was on the wrong side of this argument):”

  96. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “If LeCun pulls the same stuff in his new company, morale will be deathly low.”

  97. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “My own view, which I stand by, is that we need “neurosymbolic” contributions from both traditions if we are to get to trustworthy AI.”

  98. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “Of course, the LLM companies have armies of humans; in my own brief experiments a couple hours later, OpenAI had apparently already patched this particular problem.”

  99. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Gary Marcus

    “But nobody should be surprised by these errors; they emanate from the same dynamics as hallucinations: pure LLMs correlate words in their training, but lack stable, revisable world models.”

  100. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    Ed Zitron

    “which also includes evidence that OpenAI's revenues were at around $4.5 billion by the end of September, a vast difference from the $4.3 billion for the first half of the year published by other outlets.”