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Yeah. I don't trust Gary Marcus, and I don't know why the media buys into his persona. Gary Marcus features a Forbes story in his Twitter bio, "7 Must-Read Boo

Yeah. I don't trust Gary Marcus, and I don't know why the media buys into his persona. Gary Marcus features a Forbes story in his Twitter bio, "7 Must-Read Books About Artificial Intelligence". That's an article which Gary Marcus paid for (that's what "Forbes Contributor" means; they're cheap, too!). This makes alarm bells go off. Marcus was one of the founders of "Geometric Intelligence", which was acquired by Uber. 3 months later, Marcus left Uber, and claimed he remained a "special advisor"[0] to Uber; when Recode said he was no longer employed at all[1]. By my reading, it's possible Geometric Intelligence was just a patent troll, and was acquired simply for its patents[2][3]. Select extracts from that Wired piece: > The company has filed for at least one patent, Marcus says. But it hasn't published research or offered a product > But Marcus paints deep neural nets as an extremely limited technology, because the vast swaths of data needed to train them aren't always available. Geometric Intelligence, he says, is building technology that can train machines with far smaller amounts of data. [uh oh; my BS detector just went off.] I heard Marcus published papers on AI; does anyone know if they're any good? Is this guy just a successful self-promoter? Why is he being paraded by media as the AI expert? Why does he sound so shady? (especially with that Forbes link, yikes; sorry but I can't take anyone seriously who pays for fake positive news stories). I mentioned this about Marcus at the end of this comment, 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32866142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32866142 (I should also add: when the media has "go-to" experts, they're not primarily selected for their expertise, per-se, but for how "available" and eager they are to respond to all interview requests; I've seen the other side of that curtain.) [0]: https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/the-head-of-ubers-ai-labs-is-latest-to-leave-the-company-1513300831 https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/the-head-of-ubers-ai-labs-i... [1]: https://www.vox.com/2017/3/8/14863560/uber-ai-gary-marcus-geometric-intelligence https://www.vox.com/2017/3/8/14863560/uber-ai-gary-marcus-ge... [2]: https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/124838-92#overview https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/124838-92#overview [3]: https://www.wired.com/2016/12/uber-buys-mysterious-startup-make-ai-company/ https://www.wired.com/2016/12/uber-buys-mysterious-startup-m...

feraloink 4y ago
Gary Marcus's takes aren't credible, for all the reasons you cited (Forbes contributor... roll eyes) and this, from the interview with Ezra: >Take GPT-3. ChatGPT itself probably won’t let you do this. And you say to it, make up some misinformation about Covid and vaccines. And it will write a whole story for you, including sentences like, “A study in JAMA” — that’s one of the leading medical journals — “found that only 2% of people who took the vaccines were helped by it.” You have a news story that looks like... it was written by a human being. It’ll have all the style and form, making up its sources and data. And humans might catch one, but what if there are 10 or 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 of these? Then it becomes very difficult to monitor them. That's absurd. First, because if there's a JAMA study (love how he explains that it is Journal of American Medical Association) that is used to support even mediocre science journalism, e.g. an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal or Newsweek, then it has an inline link to the JAMA study. Both CNN and Fox do similarly! After getting burned enough times, their reporters even learned to distinguish between MedrXiv and peer-reviewed articles. GPT-3 doesn't make fake URLs with fake associated JAMA articles. Computational journalism has been around for a long time. Gary Marcus underestimates and lacks understanding of humans AND GPT3! If GPT3 spews 10,000 fake, unsourced COVID vaccine efficacy news articles, that isn't an existential risk to humanity. GPT3 is impressive but it can't do everything (yet?) e.g. it has trouble taking derivatives of funcitons. It will give reasonable sounding answers to StackOverflow questions but the substance will be incorrect. Yes, it's annoying, but the StackOverflow OP will realize and look for help elsewhere. Gary's take: >Now everybody in the programming field uses Stack Overflow all the time. It’s like a cherished resource for everybody. It’s a place to swap information. And so many people put fake answers on this thing where it’s humans ask questions, humans give answers, that Stack Overflow had to ban people putting computer-generated answers there. It was literally existential for that website. If enough people put answers that seemed plausible but we’re not actually true, no one would go to the website anymore. Best of all: >And imagine that on a much bigger scale, the scale where you can’t trust anything on Twitter or anything on Facebook... because you don’t know which parts are true and which parts are not. Anyone who blindly trusts what they read on Twitter or Facebook has bigger problems than ChatGPT. How naive does Gary think people are?! EDIT: I am more concerned by coding contests where GPT-3 DOES run circles around human contestants.
- cma 4y ago
  > then it has an inline link to the JAMA study. Both CNN and Fox do similarly! I thought he was pretty clearly saying the JAMA study in his example would be made up by chatgpt. I've seen it make up lots of fake citatations so maybe I just had that back of mind and assumed wrong? > Gary Marcus doesn't realize that spewing 10,000 erroneous COVID vaccine efficacy news articles isn't among them. He caveated in the interview about this one or a similar one that the safety filter may stop it. > Anyone who blindly trusts what they read on Twitter or Facebook has bigger problems than ChatGPT. How naive does Gary think people are?! He's clearly saying it is a matter of degree when he details the submachinegun analogy to it, and a matter of cost when he compares actual costs of a human troll-farm. I think he was wrong about several things, mostly in dismissing and its generalization ability and ability to come up with abstract metaphors related to the text, etc., but I don't think your comment is being very fair to him.

feraloink 4y ago

Gary Marcus's takes aren't credible, for all the reasons you cited (Forbes contributor... roll eyes) and this, from the interview with Ezra: >Take GPT-3. ChatGPT itself probably won’t let you do this. And you say to it, make up some misinformation about Covid and vaccines. And it will write a whole story for you, including sentences like, “A study in JAMA” — that’s one of the leading medical journals — “found that only 2% of people who took the vaccines were helped by it.” You have a news story that looks like... it was written by a human being. It’ll have all the style and form, making up its sources and data. And humans might catch one, but what if there are 10 or 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 of these? Then it becomes very difficult to monitor them. That's absurd. First, because if there's a JAMA study (love how he explains that it is Journal of American Medical Association) that is used to support even mediocre science journalism, e.g. an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal or Newsweek, then it has an inline link to the JAMA study. Both CNN and Fox do similarly! After getting burned enough times, their reporters even learned to distinguish between MedrXiv and peer-reviewed articles. GPT-3 doesn't make fake URLs with fake associated JAMA articles. Computational journalism has been around for a long time. Gary Marcus underestimates and lacks understanding of humans AND GPT3! If GPT3 spews 10,000 fake, unsourced COVID vaccine efficacy news articles, that isn't an existential risk to humanity. GPT3 is impressive but it can't do everything (yet?) e.g. it has trouble taking derivatives of funcitons. It will give reasonable sounding answers to StackOverflow questions but the substance will be incorrect. Yes, it's annoying, but the StackOverflow OP will realize and look for help elsewhere. Gary's take: >Now everybody in the programming field uses Stack Overflow all the time. It’s like a cherished resource for everybody. It’s a place to swap information. And so many people put fake answers on this thing where it’s humans ask questions, humans give answers, that Stack Overflow had to ban people putting computer-generated answers there. It was literally existential for that website. If enough people put answers that seemed plausible but we’re not actually true, no one would go to the website anymore. Best of all: >And imagine that on a much bigger scale, the scale where you can’t trust anything on Twitter or anything on Facebook... because you don’t know which parts are true and which parts are not. Anyone who blindly trusts what they read on Twitter or Facebook has bigger problems than ChatGPT. How naive does Gary think people are?! EDIT: I am more concerned by coding contests where GPT-3 DOES run circles around human contestants.

cma 4y ago
> then it has an inline link to the JAMA study. Both CNN and Fox do similarly! I thought he was pretty clearly saying the JAMA study in his example would be made up by chatgpt. I've seen it make up lots of fake citatations so maybe I just had that back of mind and assumed wrong? > Gary Marcus doesn't realize that spewing 10,000 erroneous COVID vaccine efficacy news articles isn't among them. He caveated in the interview about this one or a similar one that the safety filter may stop it. > Anyone who blindly trusts what they read on Twitter or Facebook has bigger problems than ChatGPT. How naive does Gary think people are?! He's clearly saying it is a matter of degree when he details the submachinegun analogy to it, and a matter of cost when he compares actual costs of a human troll-farm. I think he was wrong about several things, mostly in dismissing and its generalization ability and ability to come up with abstract metaphors related to the text, etc., but I don't think your comment is being very fair to him.