4 ms·

Gary Marcus isn't about "getting real", it's making a name for himself as a contrarian to the popular AI narrative. This article may seem reasonable, but here

by senko 1y ago

Gary Marcus isn't about "getting real", it's making a name for himself as a contrarian to the popular AI narrative. This article may seem reasonable, but here he's defending a paper that in his previous article he called "A knockout blow for LLMs". Many of his articles seem reasonable (if a bit off) until you read a couple dozen a spot a trend.

adamgordonbell 1y ago
This! For all his complaints about llms, his writing could be generated by an llm with a prompt saying: 'write an article responding to this news with an essay saying that you are once again right that this AI stuff is overblown and will never amount to anything.'
- woopsn 1y ago
  Given that the links work, the quotes were actually said, numbers are correct, cited research actually exists etc we can immediately rule that out.
steamrolled 1y ago
> Gary Marcus isn't about "getting real", it's making a name for himself as a contrarian to the popular AI narrative. That's an odd standard. Not wanting to be wrong is a universal human instinct. By that logic, every person who ever took any position on LLMs is automatically untrustworthy. After all, they made a name for themselves by being pro- or con-. Or maybe a centrist - that's a position too. Either he makes good points or he doesn't. Unless he has a track record of distorting facts, his ideological leanings should be irrelevant.
- sinenomine 1y ago
  Marcus' points routinely fail to pass scrutiny, nobody in the field takes him seriously. If you seek real scientifically interesting LLM criticism, read François Chollet and his Arc AGI series of evals.
- senko 1y ago
  He makes many very good points: For example he continusly calls out AGI hype for what it is, and also showcases dangers of naive use of LLMs (eg. lawyers copy-pasting hallucinated cases into their documents, etc). For this, he has plenty of material! He also makes some very bad points and worse inferences: that LLMs as a technology are useless because they can't lead to AGI, that hallucation makes LLMs useless (but then he contradicts himself in another article conceding they "may have some use"), that because they can't follow an algorithm they're useless, etc, that scaling laws are over therefore LLMs won't advance (he's been making that for a couple of years), that AI bubble will collapse in a few months (also a few years of that), etc. Read any of his article (I've read too many, sadly) and you'll never come to the conclusion that LLMs might be a useful technology, or be "a good thing" even in some limited way. This just doesn't fit with reality I can observe with my own eyes. To me, this shows he's incredibly biased. That's okay if he wants to be a pundit - I couldn't blame Gruber for being biased about Apple! But Marcus presents himself as the authority on AI, a scientist, showing a real and unbiased view on the field. In fact, he's as full of hype as Sam Altman is, just in another direction. Imagine he was talking about aviation, not AI. 787 dreamliner crashes? "I've been saying for 10 years that airplanes are unsafe, they can fall from the sky!" Boeing the company does stupid shit? "Blown door shows why airplane makers can't be trusted" Airline goes bankrupt? "Air travel winter is here" I've spoken to too many intelligent people who read Marcus, take him at his words and have incredibly warped views on the actual potential and dangers of AI (and send me links to his latest piece with "so this sounds pretty damning, what's your take?"). He does real damage. Compare him with Simon Willison, who also writes about AI a lot, and is vocal about its shortcomings and dangers. Reading Simon, I never get the feeling I'm being sold on a story (either positive or negative), but that I learned something. Perhaps a Marcus is inevitable as a symptom of the Internet's immune system to the huge amount of AI hype and bullshit being thrown around. Perhaps Gary is just fed up with everything and comes out guns blazing, science be damned. I don't know. But in my mind, he's as much BSer as the AGI singularity hypers.
  - ImageDeeply 1y ago
    > Compare him with Simon Willison, who also writes about AI a lot, and is vocal about its shortcomings and dangers. Reading Simon, I never get the feeling I'm being sold on a story (either positive or negative), but that I learned something. Very true!
2muchcoffeeman 1y ago
What’s the argument here that he’s not considering all the information regarding GenAI? That there’s a trend to his opinion? If I consider all the evidence regarding gravity, all my papers will be “gravity is real”. In what ways is he only choosing what he wants to hear?
- senko 1y ago
  Replied elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44279283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44279283 To your example about gravity, I argue that he goes from "gravity is real" to "therefore we can't fly", and "yeah maybe some people can but that's not really solving gravity and they need to go down eventually!"
  - 2muchcoffeeman 1y ago
    If your argument about my gravity example holds. That’s not really a good argument. Between Newtons death and the first powered flight was almost 200 years. Being all negative about gravity would be reasonable since a bunch of stuff had to happen. I’m not sure I buy your longer argument either. I have a feeling the nay sayers are right on this. The next leap in AI isn’t something we’re going to recognise. (Obviously it’s possible - humans exist)
bobxmax 1y ago
[flagged]
- g-b-r 1y ago
  I see the opposite, the wide majority of people commenting on Hacker News seem now very favorable to LLMs.
  - bobxmax 1y ago
    Not at all.
  - ramchip 1y ago
    I think a common opinion is that it's useful as a research and code generation tool, and that it has some really negative effects on the Internet and society in general. Since the discussion on HN is often focused on coding the first aspect is just a bit more visible.
newswasboring 1y ago
What exactly is your objection here? That the guy has an opinion and is writing about it?
- senko 1y ago
  Replied elsewere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44279283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44279283
ramchip 1y ago
I was very put off by his article "A knockout blow for LLMs?", especially all the fuss he was making about using his own name as a verb to mean debunking AI hype...
- ninjin 1y ago
  Marcus comes with a very standard cognitive science criticism of statistical approaches to artificial intelligence, many parts of which dates back to the late 50s from when the field was born and moved to distance itself from behaviourism. The worst part to me is not that his criticism is entirely wrong, but rather that it is obvious and yet peddled as something that those of us that develop statistical approaches are completely ignorant of. To make matters worse, instead of developing alternative approaches (like plenty of my colleagues in cognitive science do!), he simply reiterates pretty much the same points over and over and has done so at least for the last twenty or so years. He and others paint themselves as sceptics and bulwarks against the current hype (which I can assure you, I hate at least as much as they do). But, to me, they are cynics, not sceptics. I try to maintain a positive and open mind of other researchers, but Marcus lost me pretty much at "first contact" when a student in the group who leaned towards cognitive science had us read "Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal" by Marcus (2018) [1] back around when it was published. Finally I could get into the mind of this guy so many people were talking about! 27 pages and yet I learned next to nothing new as the criticism was just the same one we have heard for decades: "Statistical learning has limits! It may not lead to 'truly" intelligent machines!". Not only that, the whole piece consistently conflates deep learning and statistical learning for no reason at all, reads as if it was rushed (and not proofed), emphasises the author's research strongly rather than giving a broad overview, etc. In short, it is bad, very bad as a scientific piece. At times, I read short excerpts of an article Marcus has written and yet sadly it is pretty much the same thing all over again. [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00631 https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00631 There is a horrible market to "sell" hype when it comes to artificial intelligence, but there is also a horrible market to "sell" anti-hype. Sadly, both brings traffic, attention, talk invitations, etc. Two largely unscientific tribes, that I personally would rather do without, with their own profiting gurus.

by senko 1y ago

adamgordonbell 1y ago

This! For all his complaints about llms, his writing could be generated by an llm with a prompt saying: 'write an article responding to this news with an essay saying that you are once again right that this AI stuff is overblown and will never amount to anything.'

woopsn 1y ago
Given that the links work, the quotes were actually said, numbers are correct, cited research actually exists etc we can immediately rule that out.

steamrolled 1y ago

> Gary Marcus isn't about "getting real", it's making a name for himself as a contrarian to the popular AI narrative. That's an odd standard. Not wanting to be wrong is a universal human instinct. By that logic, every person who ever took any position on LLMs is automatically untrustworthy. After all, they made a name for themselves by being pro- or con-. Or maybe a centrist - that's a position too. Either he makes good points or he doesn't. Unless he has a track record of distorting facts, his ideological leanings should be irrelevant.

sinenomine 1y ago
Marcus' points routinely fail to pass scrutiny, nobody in the field takes him seriously. If you seek real scientifically interesting LLM criticism, read François Chollet and his Arc AGI series of evals.
senko 1y ago
He makes many very good points: For example he continusly calls out AGI hype for what it is, and also showcases dangers of naive use of LLMs (eg. lawyers copy-pasting hallucinated cases into their documents, etc). For this, he has plenty of material! He also makes some very bad points and worse inferences: that LLMs as a technology are useless because they can't lead to AGI, that hallucation makes LLMs useless (but then he contradicts himself in another article conceding they "may have some use"), that because they can't follow an algorithm they're useless, etc, that scaling laws are over therefore LLMs won't advance (he's been making that for a couple of years), that AI bubble will collapse in a few months (also a few years of that), etc. Read any of his article (I've read too many, sadly) and you'll never come to the conclusion that LLMs might be a useful technology, or be "a good thing" even in some limited way. This just doesn't fit with reality I can observe with my own eyes. To me, this shows he's incredibly biased. That's okay if he wants to be a pundit - I couldn't blame Gruber for being biased about Apple! But Marcus presents himself as the authority on AI, a scientist, showing a real and unbiased view on the field. In fact, he's as full of hype as Sam Altman is, just in another direction. Imagine he was talking about aviation, not AI. 787 dreamliner crashes? "I've been saying for 10 years that airplanes are unsafe, they can fall from the sky!" Boeing the company does stupid shit? "Blown door shows why airplane makers can't be trusted" Airline goes bankrupt? "Air travel winter is here" I've spoken to too many intelligent people who read Marcus, take him at his words and have incredibly warped views on the actual potential and dangers of AI (and send me links to his latest piece with "so this sounds pretty damning, what's your take?"). He does real damage. Compare him with Simon Willison, who also writes about AI a lot, and is vocal about its shortcomings and dangers. Reading Simon, I never get the feeling I'm being sold on a story (either positive or negative), but that I learned something. Perhaps a Marcus is inevitable as a symptom of the Internet's immune system to the huge amount of AI hype and bullshit being thrown around. Perhaps Gary is just fed up with everything and comes out guns blazing, science be damned. I don't know. But in my mind, he's as much BSer as the AGI singularity hypers.
- ImageDeeply 1y ago
  > Compare him with Simon Willison, who also writes about AI a lot, and is vocal about its shortcomings and dangers. Reading Simon, I never get the feeling I'm being sold on a story (either positive or negative), but that I learned something. Very true!

2muchcoffeeman 1y ago

What’s the argument here that he’s not considering all the information regarding GenAI? That there’s a trend to his opinion? If I consider all the evidence regarding gravity, all my papers will be “gravity is real”. In what ways is he only choosing what he wants to hear?

senko 1y ago
Replied elsewhere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44279283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44279283 To your example about gravity, I argue that he goes from "gravity is real" to "therefore we can't fly", and "yeah maybe some people can but that's not really solving gravity and they need to go down eventually!"
- 2muchcoffeeman 1y ago
  If your argument about my gravity example holds. That’s not really a good argument. Between Newtons death and the first powered flight was almost 200 years. Being all negative about gravity would be reasonable since a bunch of stuff had to happen. I’m not sure I buy your longer argument either. I have a feeling the nay sayers are right on this. The next leap in AI isn’t something we’re going to recognise. (Obviously it’s possible - humans exist)

bobxmax 1y ago

[flagged]

g-b-r 1y ago
I see the opposite, the wide majority of people commenting on Hacker News seem now very favorable to LLMs.
- bobxmax 1y ago
  Not at all.
- ramchip 1y ago
  I think a common opinion is that it's useful as a research and code generation tool, and that it has some really negative effects on the Internet and society in general. Since the discussion on HN is often focused on coding the first aspect is just a bit more visible.

newswasboring 1y ago

What exactly is your objection here? That the guy has an opinion and is writing about it?

senko 1y ago
Replied elsewere in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44279283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44279283

ramchip 1y ago

I was very put off by his article "A knockout blow for LLMs?", especially all the fuss he was making about using his own name as a verb to mean debunking AI hype...

ninjin 1y ago
Marcus comes with a very standard cognitive science criticism of statistical approaches to artificial intelligence, many parts of which dates back to the late 50s from when the field was born and moved to distance itself from behaviourism. The worst part to me is not that his criticism is entirely wrong, but rather that it is obvious and yet peddled as something that those of us that develop statistical approaches are completely ignorant of. To make matters worse, instead of developing alternative approaches (like plenty of my colleagues in cognitive science do!), he simply reiterates pretty much the same points over and over and has done so at least for the last twenty or so years. He and others paint themselves as sceptics and bulwarks against the current hype (which I can assure you, I hate at least as much as they do). But, to me, they are cynics, not sceptics. I try to maintain a positive and open mind of other researchers, but Marcus lost me pretty much at "first contact" when a student in the group who leaned towards cognitive science had us read "Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal" by Marcus (2018) [1] back around when it was published. Finally I could get into the mind of this guy so many people were talking about! 27 pages and yet I learned next to nothing new as the criticism was just the same one we have heard for decades: "Statistical learning has limits! It may not lead to 'truly" intelligent machines!". Not only that, the whole piece consistently conflates deep learning and statistical learning for no reason at all, reads as if it was rushed (and not proofed), emphasises the author's research strongly rather than giving a broad overview, etc. In short, it is bad, very bad as a scientific piece. At times, I read short excerpts of an article Marcus has written and yet sadly it is pretty much the same thing all over again. [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00631 https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00631 There is a horrible market to "sell" hype when it comes to artificial intelligence, but there is also a horrible market to "sell" anti-hype. Sadly, both brings traffic, attention, talk invitations, etc. Two largely unscientific tribes, that I personally would rather do without, with their own profiting gurus.