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The AI community requires more independent experts like Marcus to maintain integrity and transparency, ensuring that the field does not succumb to hyperbole as

The AI community requires more independent experts like Marcus to maintain integrity and transparency, ensuring that the field does not succumb to hyperbole as well as shifting standards such as "internally achieved AGI", etc. Regardless of personal opinions about his style, Marcus has been proven correct on several fronts, including the diminishing returns of scaling laws and the lack of true reasoning (out of distribution generalizability) in LLM-type AI. These are issues that the industry initially denied, only to (years) later acknowledge them as their "own recent discoveries" as soon as they had something new to sell (chain-of-thought approach, RL-based LLM, tbc.).

kylehotchkiss 1y ago
Agreed, the hype cycles need vocal critics. The loudest voices talking about LLMs are the ones who financially benefit the most for it. I’m not anti-AI, I think the hype and gaslighting the entire economy to believe this is the sole thing that is going to render them unemployed is ridiculous (the economy is rough for a myriad of other reasons, most of which come originate from our countries choice in leadership) Hopefully the innovation slowing means that all the products I use will move past trying to duck tape AI on and start working on actual features/bugs again
- igorkraw 1y ago
  I have a tiny tiny podcast with a friend where we try to break down what parts of the hype are bullshit (muck) and which kernels of truth are there, if any, startedpartially as a place to scream into the void, partially to help the people who are anxious about AGI or otherwise bring harmed by the hype. I think we have a long way to go in terms of presentation (breaking down very technical terms to an audience that is used to vague-hype around "AI" is hard), but we cite our sources, maybe it'll be interesting gpr you to check out out shownotes https://kairos.fm/muckraikers/ https://kairos.fm/muckraikers/ I personally struggle with Gary Marcus critiques because whenever they are about "making ai work" it goes into neurosymbploc "AI" which o have technical disagreements with, and I have _other_ arguments for the points he sometimes raises which I think are more rigorous, so it's difficult to be roughly in the same camp - but overall I'm happy someone with reach is calling BS ad well.
heyoni 1y ago
I don’t associate any of these AI limitations and mischaracterizations with Marcus. Do you?
vessenes 1y ago
Hard disagree. The essay is a rehash of Reddit complaints, no direct results from testing and largely about product launch (simultaneous launch to 500mm+ users mind you) snafus. Please. I think most hit pieces like this miss what is actually important about the 5 launch - it’s the first product launch in the space. We are moving on from model improvements to a concept of what a full product might look like. The things that matter about 5 are not thinking strength, although it is moderately better than o3 in my tests, which is roughly what the benchmarks say. What’s important is that it’s faster, that it’s integrated, that it’s set up to provide incremental improvements (to say multimodal interaction, image generation and so on) without needing the branding of a new model, and I think the very largest improvement is its ability to retain context and goals over a very long set of tools uses. Willison mentioned it’s his only daily driver now (for a largely coding based usage setup), and I would say it’s significantly better at getting a larger / longer / more context needed coding task than the prior best — Claude - or the prior best architects (o3-pro or Gemini depending). It’s also much faster than o3-pro for coding. Anyway, saying “Reddit users who have formed parasocial relationships with 4o didn’t like this launch -> oAI is doomed” is weak analysis, and pointless.
- ModernMech 1y ago
  If ChatGPT 5 lived up to the hype, literally no one would be asking for old models back. The snafus are minor as far as presentations go, but their existence completely undermines the product OpenAI is selling, which is an expert in your pocket. They showed everyone this "expert" can't even assist the creators themselves to nail such a high stakes presentation; OpenAI's embarrassing oversights foretell similar embarrassments for anyone who relies on this product for their high stakes presentation or report.

kylehotchkiss 1y ago

Agreed, the hype cycles need vocal critics. The loudest voices talking about LLMs are the ones who financially benefit the most for it. I’m not anti-AI, I think the hype and gaslighting the entire economy to believe this is the sole thing that is going to render them unemployed is ridiculous (the economy is rough for a myriad of other reasons, most of which come originate from our countries choice in leadership) Hopefully the innovation slowing means that all the products I use will move past trying to duck tape AI on and start working on actual features/bugs again

igorkraw 1y ago
I have a tiny tiny podcast with a friend where we try to break down what parts of the hype are bullshit (muck) and which kernels of truth are there, if any, startedpartially as a place to scream into the void, partially to help the people who are anxious about AGI or otherwise bring harmed by the hype. I think we have a long way to go in terms of presentation (breaking down very technical terms to an audience that is used to vague-hype around "AI" is hard), but we cite our sources, maybe it'll be interesting gpr you to check out out shownotes https://kairos.fm/muckraikers/ https://kairos.fm/muckraikers/ I personally struggle with Gary Marcus critiques because whenever they are about "making ai work" it goes into neurosymbploc "AI" which o have technical disagreements with, and I have _other_ arguments for the points he sometimes raises which I think are more rigorous, so it's difficult to be roughly in the same camp - but overall I'm happy someone with reach is calling BS ad well.

heyoni 1y ago

I don’t associate any of these AI limitations and mischaracterizations with Marcus. Do you?

vessenes 1y ago

Hard disagree. The essay is a rehash of Reddit complaints, no direct results from testing and largely about product launch (simultaneous launch to 500mm+ users mind you) snafus. Please. I think most hit pieces like this miss what is actually important about the 5 launch - it’s the first product launch in the space. We are moving on from model improvements to a concept of what a full product might look like. The things that matter about 5 are not thinking strength, although it is moderately better than o3 in my tests, which is roughly what the benchmarks say. What’s important is that it’s faster, that it’s integrated, that it’s set up to provide incremental improvements (to say multimodal interaction, image generation and so on) without needing the branding of a new model, and I think the very largest improvement is its ability to retain context and goals over a very long set of tools uses. Willison mentioned it’s his only daily driver now (for a largely coding based usage setup), and I would say it’s significantly better at getting a larger / longer / more context needed coding task than the prior best — Claude - or the prior best architects (o3-pro or Gemini depending). It’s also much faster than o3-pro for coding. Anyway, saying “Reddit users who have formed parasocial relationships with 4o didn’t like this launch -> oAI is doomed” is weak analysis, and pointless.

ModernMech 1y ago
If ChatGPT 5 lived up to the hype, literally no one would be asking for old models back. The snafus are minor as far as presentations go, but their existence completely undermines the product OpenAI is selling, which is an expert in your pocket. They showed everyone this "expert" can't even assist the creators themselves to nail such a high stakes presentation; OpenAI's embarrassing oversights foretell similar embarrassments for anyone who relies on this product for their high stakes presentation or report.