7 ms·

It's worth it to ask, when reading Gary Marcus pat himself on the back, how many of his predictions were actually falsifiable.... Few-to-none. Furthermore, the

It's worth it to ask, when reading Gary Marcus pat himself on the back, how many of his predictions were actually falsifiable.... Few-to-none. Furthermore, there has been insane progress over the last few years, which presumably would not have happened if everyone had despaired on reading Marcus' 'hitting a wall' article and dropped everything to work on GOFAI. But let's widen the lens a little bit: `In 2015, shortly after Hinton joined Google, The Guardian reported that the company was on the verge of “developing algorithms with the capacity for logic, natural conversation and even flirtation.” In November 2020, Hinton told MIT Technology Review that “deep learning is going to be able to do everything.” I seriously doubt it.` Well, we've certainly got natural conversation and flirtation, along with some kind of logic - especially if you're OK with accepting python programs as a form of response. This is well beyond what was considered possible at the time. We're certainly not at 'everything' but *shrug*. Maybe in ten years. `nowhere near the ordinary day-to-day intelligence of Rosey the Robot, a science-fiction housekeeper that could not only interpret a wide variety of human requests but safely act on them in real time.` It exists, it just isn't anywhere near economical for household tasks... https://www.wired.com/story/google-robot-learned-to-take-orders-by-scraping-the-web/ https://www.wired.com/story/google-robot-learned-to-take-ord... LLM's look poised to upend robotics. Marcus then goes extensively into why everyone should be looking at symbol-manipulation systems. And that's fine... But would be much more convincing if he could actually produce something that works. At some point, one asks, if your idea is so good, why haven't you actually solved any problems?

martindbp 3y ago
Like Yann LeCun said, Gary Marcus has contributed exactly nothing to the field, he's an influencer that claims to be an expert. Just ignore him.
- nh23423fefe 3y ago
  to wit: his appearance on Ezra Klein was pretty terrible >It’s a kind of glorified cut and paste. Pastiche is putting together things kind of imitating a style. And in some sense, that’s what it’s doing. It’s imitating particular styles, and it’s cutting and pasting a lot of stuff. It’s a little bit more complicated than that. But to a first approximation, that’s what it’s doing is cutting and pasting things. This argument is terrible because it proves too much. Either AIs are automata with no connection to the world, or if they are connected to the world its just copy-paste. And somehow infants aren't just copy paste because uuuuh they have "true understanding" whatever that is. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-gary-marcus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/podcasts/transcript-ezra-...
trimethylpurine 3y ago
I can afford one. But if it tells me lies and picks up the wrong remote I want a refund, as would most customers spending more than $1000 on pretty much anything. And that's the real issue, I think. The marketing has far surpassed the reality of the actual product. People buy helicopters, and jets, and houses larger than an office building. It's not the cost that's at issue. There's room for bullshit in a chat bot. But there's absolutely zero tolerance for bullshit in a physical device roaming around children. I think the point of the article is that no one has even presented a workable theory for real AI with real comprehension. LLM isn't AI, regardless of the marketing. Until that theory exists, and is implemented, ideas about what AI will someday grow into are ignoring comprehension. That's a required component if you are using the word "intelligence" outside of fiction.
- wruza 3y ago
  there's absolutely zero tolerance for bullshit in a physical device roaming around children Why not just put a muzzle on it? LLM isn't AI, regardless of the marketing That’s intelism. Different models have different capabilities, you can’t decide which is good enough for you to treat as intelligent. You use terms like intelligence and comprehension, which don’t even have a definition better than “I know it when I see it”. Not even going to discuss that you want to buy an actually intelligent being for picking up remotes.
  - trimethylpurine 3y ago
    Whoops. You've contradicted yourself. I didn't advertise a robot picking up a remote for sale as intelligent. I'm advocating that we stop calling it intelligent when it isn't. You're saying it's intelligent. So either you're ready to offend the previous commenter for their evil advocacy of selling an intelligent robot made to pick up remotes for an advertisement, or you're at odds with your point because you know damn well it's not intelligent. My guess is the latter. From the dictionary: the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations : REASON also : the skilled use of reason (2) : the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (such as tests) This robot or ChatGPT, or any LLM theorized to my knowledge does not meet that definition due to the underlying technology not approaching "abstract" or "skilled use of reason." It's pretty simply not addressing those items. There's no debate. It's a completely different approach to something that has nothing to do with intelligence. And marketing it as such is frankly a legal issue, in my opinion. I fully expect the lawsuits to continue until marketers are forced to stop using that term entirely. As an additional note, you've muddied up a lot of concepts here. I'm not sure if you're maybe not a native speaker of English, as that might explain a lot, or if you really accidentally made opposing points sequentially. The latter is a bit funny in a discussion about intelligence. "Intelligent robot" wouldn't refer to one that feels and needs civil rights. The definition is above for your review. It's very much clear, despite your protest, what intelligence means. It is, by definition, not subjective, but objective. And there are absolutely legal definitions with very real legal ramifications. Also, you should read back through your own comments. You're not a very likable person, and I'm telling you that as a personal favor. You should get some help for this. It's critical for your personal relationships, and it's not very expensive.
dataflow 3y ago
I have no idea whom this guy is, and have no thoughts here on his opinions or their falsifiability (happy to agree with you on that aspect if it matters), but just to reply to this particular point here: > This is well beyond what was considered possible at the time. We're certainly not at 'everything' but shrug. Maybe in ten years. This feels a lot like what people were saying about self-driving cars being imminent circa... 2015 or so? [1] The skeptical folks rolled their eyes at suggestions that we'd have self driving cars everywhere in a few years, but lo and behold, they were right. Just because we had a massive amount of progress in the years before, that doesn't mean we were on the cusp of achieving the goal. Turns out going from 99.9% accurate to 99.99% accurate (or whatever the numbers were) is harder than all the believers wanted to admit. This feels like the same thing all over again. Yes, there's been a lot of progress in LLMs. No, that doesn't mean we're anywhere close to deep learning being able to do 'everything' in 10 years, whatever that means. [1] https://www.theverge.com/24065447/self-driving-car-autonomous-tesla-gm-baidu https://www.theverge.com/24065447/self-driving-car-autonomou...
- Animats 3y ago
  "Turns out going from 99.9% accurate to 99.99% accurate (or whatever the numbers were) is harder than all the believers wanted to admit." True. But Calfornia's DMV makes Waymo publish their stats, and they get maybe 50% better each year. That's a good rate of gain.
  - dataflow 3y ago
    Of course they've been making good gains. We may very well get there someday. It's just nowhere near the timeline many experts were so confident in.
  - JohnKemeny 3y ago
    Citation needed
    - Animats 3y ago
      https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/autonomous-vehicles/ https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...
aredox 3y ago
What do mean, "not falsifiable"? Do we have self-driving cars? LLM attorneys? LLM radiologists? No, no and no. And the continuous failure of self-driving cars should worry you.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  The one that jumped out to me was his claiming that computers don’t truly understand language. At this point I don’t know what that means. I’ll be the first to admit the limitations of statistical language models, but for people like Marcus who have made a name for themselves as skeptics, it’s not in their interests to have falsifiable criticisms.
- kenjackson 3y ago
  We do have self driving cars.
  - aredox 3y ago
    Tesla says: >The currently enabled Autopilot, Enhanced Autopilot and Full Self-Driving features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous. Also, how long will you have self-driving? It is notorious for having dangerous regressions after an update. Those AI systems are black boxes with stochastic behavior.
    - sdenton4 3y ago
      And humans in cars are meat-boxes of stochastic behavior, prone to all kinds of dangerous regressions. I feel safer, as a cyclist, around Waymos than I do around many human-driven cars. That's even with the cyclist crash last week: it was one of the most common kinds of bicycle-car collisions (bike moving through an intersection hidden behind a truck, hit by a car turning left), and I feel confident that the vehicle responded faster to the situation than a human would have.
- becquerel 3y ago
  My partner rides self-driving cars frequently, over a dozen times this year. The technology clearly and manifestly exists.
Animats 3y ago
"LLM's look poised to upend robotics." Maybe. Unstructured manipulation is getting better very slowly. But videos such as the Google one and this one [1] are mostly about making the system take instructions in natural language, not doing the actual picking. Bin-picking of uniform items is a solved problem, and was first working in the 1980s. Bin-picking of random items from a cluttered bin is still a struggle. Amazon has put a fair amount of effort into robotic bin-picking, but it's not yet good enough to deploy. There's been some good progress on bin-picking recently. Here's Brightpick's system.[2] It has a good vision system which involves LIDAR, and some nice engineering. It's not LLM-based, and it won't do everything, but it can handle most objects that can be picked up by a vacuum picker. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31Xqw_59XZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31Xqw_59XZ8 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWlQWgRfh6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWlQWgRfh6c
garspin 3y ago
The point Marcus is making is that LLMs are solely next word predictors - intelligence requires far more than that. LLMs will always have the same basic challenges - their 'kinda copy what a human has written' algorithm has hit its limit. He is an advocate of symbolic learning - getting that to work is a lot harder, however it's far more likely to result in genuine intelligence.

martindbp 3y ago

Like Yann LeCun said, Gary Marcus has contributed exactly nothing to the field, he's an influencer that claims to be an expert. Just ignore him.

nh23423fefe 3y ago
to wit: his appearance on Ezra Klein was pretty terrible >It’s a kind of glorified cut and paste. Pastiche is putting together things kind of imitating a style. And in some sense, that’s what it’s doing. It’s imitating particular styles, and it’s cutting and pasting a lot of stuff. It’s a little bit more complicated than that. But to a first approximation, that’s what it’s doing is cutting and pasting things. This argument is terrible because it proves too much. Either AIs are automata with no connection to the world, or if they are connected to the world its just copy-paste. And somehow infants aren't just copy paste because uuuuh they have "true understanding" whatever that is. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-gary-marcus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/podcasts/transcript-ezra-...

trimethylpurine 3y ago

I can afford one. But if it tells me lies and picks up the wrong remote I want a refund, as would most customers spending more than $1000 on pretty much anything. And that's the real issue, I think. The marketing has far surpassed the reality of the actual product. People buy helicopters, and jets, and houses larger than an office building. It's not the cost that's at issue. There's room for bullshit in a chat bot. But there's absolutely zero tolerance for bullshit in a physical device roaming around children. I think the point of the article is that no one has even presented a workable theory for real AI with real comprehension. LLM isn't AI, regardless of the marketing. Until that theory exists, and is implemented, ideas about what AI will someday grow into are ignoring comprehension. That's a required component if you are using the word "intelligence" outside of fiction.

wruza 3y ago
there's absolutely zero tolerance for bullshit in a physical device roaming around children Why not just put a muzzle on it? LLM isn't AI, regardless of the marketing That’s intelism. Different models have different capabilities, you can’t decide which is good enough for you to treat as intelligent. You use terms like intelligence and comprehension, which don’t even have a definition better than “I know it when I see it”. Not even going to discuss that you want to buy an actually intelligent being for picking up remotes.
- trimethylpurine 3y ago
  Whoops. You've contradicted yourself. I didn't advertise a robot picking up a remote for sale as intelligent. I'm advocating that we stop calling it intelligent when it isn't. You're saying it's intelligent. So either you're ready to offend the previous commenter for their evil advocacy of selling an intelligent robot made to pick up remotes for an advertisement, or you're at odds with your point because you know damn well it's not intelligent. My guess is the latter. From the dictionary: the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations : REASON also : the skilled use of reason (2) : the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (such as tests) This robot or ChatGPT, or any LLM theorized to my knowledge does not meet that definition due to the underlying technology not approaching "abstract" or "skilled use of reason." It's pretty simply not addressing those items. There's no debate. It's a completely different approach to something that has nothing to do with intelligence. And marketing it as such is frankly a legal issue, in my opinion. I fully expect the lawsuits to continue until marketers are forced to stop using that term entirely. As an additional note, you've muddied up a lot of concepts here. I'm not sure if you're maybe not a native speaker of English, as that might explain a lot, or if you really accidentally made opposing points sequentially. The latter is a bit funny in a discussion about intelligence. "Intelligent robot" wouldn't refer to one that feels and needs civil rights. The definition is above for your review. It's very much clear, despite your protest, what intelligence means. It is, by definition, not subjective, but objective. And there are absolutely legal definitions with very real legal ramifications. Also, you should read back through your own comments. You're not a very likable person, and I'm telling you that as a personal favor. You should get some help for this. It's critical for your personal relationships, and it's not very expensive.

dataflow 3y ago

I have no idea whom this guy is, and have no thoughts here on his opinions or their falsifiability (happy to agree with you on that aspect if it matters), but just to reply to this particular point here: > This is well beyond what was considered possible at the time. We're certainly not at 'everything' but shrug. Maybe in ten years. This feels a lot like what people were saying about self-driving cars being imminent circa... 2015 or so? [1] The skeptical folks rolled their eyes at suggestions that we'd have self driving cars everywhere in a few years, but lo and behold, they were right. Just because we had a massive amount of progress in the years before, that doesn't mean we were on the cusp of achieving the goal. Turns out going from 99.9% accurate to 99.99% accurate (or whatever the numbers were) is harder than all the believers wanted to admit. This feels like the same thing all over again. Yes, there's been a lot of progress in LLMs. No, that doesn't mean we're anywhere close to deep learning being able to do 'everything' in 10 years, whatever that means. [1] https://www.theverge.com/24065447/self-driving-car-autonomous-tesla-gm-baidu https://www.theverge.com/24065447/self-driving-car-autonomou...

Animats 3y ago
"Turns out going from 99.9% accurate to 99.99% accurate (or whatever the numbers were) is harder than all the believers wanted to admit." True. But Calfornia's DMV makes Waymo publish their stats, and they get maybe 50% better each year. That's a good rate of gain.
- dataflow 3y ago
  Of course they've been making good gains. We may very well get there someday. It's just nowhere near the timeline many experts were so confident in.
- JohnKemeny 3y ago
  Citation needed
  - Animats 3y ago
    https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/autonomous-vehicles/ https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...

aredox 3y ago

What do mean, "not falsifiable"? Do we have self-driving cars? LLM attorneys? LLM radiologists? No, no and no. And the continuous failure of self-driving cars should worry you.

janalsncm 3y ago
The one that jumped out to me was his claiming that computers don’t truly understand language. At this point I don’t know what that means. I’ll be the first to admit the limitations of statistical language models, but for people like Marcus who have made a name for themselves as skeptics, it’s not in their interests to have falsifiable criticisms.
kenjackson 3y ago
We do have self driving cars.
- aredox 3y ago
  Tesla says: >The currently enabled Autopilot, Enhanced Autopilot and Full Self-Driving features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous. Also, how long will you have self-driving? It is notorious for having dangerous regressions after an update. Those AI systems are black boxes with stochastic behavior.
  - sdenton4 3y ago
    And humans in cars are meat-boxes of stochastic behavior, prone to all kinds of dangerous regressions. I feel safer, as a cyclist, around Waymos than I do around many human-driven cars. That's even with the cyclist crash last week: it was one of the most common kinds of bicycle-car collisions (bike moving through an intersection hidden behind a truck, hit by a car turning left), and I feel confident that the vehicle responded faster to the situation than a human would have.
becquerel 3y ago
My partner rides self-driving cars frequently, over a dozen times this year. The technology clearly and manifestly exists.

Animats 3y ago

"LLM's look poised to upend robotics." Maybe. Unstructured manipulation is getting better very slowly. But videos such as the Google one and this one [1] are mostly about making the system take instructions in natural language, not doing the actual picking. Bin-picking of uniform items is a solved problem, and was first working in the 1980s. Bin-picking of random items from a cluttered bin is still a struggle. Amazon has put a fair amount of effort into robotic bin-picking, but it's not yet good enough to deploy. There's been some good progress on bin-picking recently. Here's Brightpick's system.[2] It has a good vision system which involves LIDAR, and some nice engineering. It's not LLM-based, and it won't do everything, but it can handle most objects that can be picked up by a vacuum picker. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31Xqw_59XZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31Xqw_59XZ8 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWlQWgRfh6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWlQWgRfh6c

garspin 3y ago

The point Marcus is making is that LLMs are solely next word predictors - intelligence requires far more than that. LLMs will always have the same basic challenges - their 'kinda copy what a human has written' algorithm has hit its limit. He is an advocate of symbolic learning - getting that to work is a lot harder, however it's far more likely to result in genuine intelligence.