I don't think Gary Marcus had anything of value to say about AI at any point in what, the past 2 decades? You can replace him with a sign that has "the current AI approach is DOOMED" written on it at no loss of function.
Symbolic AI has died a miserable death, and he never recovered from it.
> Quite a wide variety of people find AI deeply ego threatening to the point of being brainwormed into spouting absolute nonsense, but why?
It makes sense when you look at this as a wider conversation. Every time Sam Altman, Elon Musk and co. predict that AGI is just around the corner, and their products will be smarter than all of humanity combined, and they are like having an expert in everything in your pocket; people like Gary Marcus are going to respond in just as extreme way in the opposite direction. Maybe if the AI billionaires with the planet-wide megaphones weren't so bombastic about their claims, certain other people wouldn't be so bombastic in their pushback.
Why the padding self on the back after a few opinions? You have large tech and government players and then you have regular people.
1. For large players: AGI is a mission worth perusing at the cost of all existing profit (you won’t pay taxes today, the stock market values you on revenue anyway, and if you succeed you can control all people and means of production).
2. For regular people the current AI capabilities have already led to either life changing skill improvement for those who make things for themselves or life changing likely permanent employment reduction for those who do things for others. If current AI is sufficient to meaningfully reduce the employment market, AGI doesn’t matter much to regular people. Their life is altered and many will be looking for manual work until AI enters that too.
3. The AI vendors are running at tremendous expense right now and the sources of liquidity for billions and trillions are very very few. It is possible a black swan event in the markets causes an abrupt end to liquidity and thus forces AI providers into pricing that excludes many existing lower-end users. That train should not be taken for granted.
4. It is also possible WebGPU and other similar scale-ai-accross-devices efforts succeed and you get much more compute unlocked to replace Advertising.
Serious question: Who in HN is actually looking forward to AGI existing?
This is not a really valuable article. The Apple paper was widely considered as a “well, duh” paper, GPT5 being underwhelming seems to be mostly a cost cutting / supply can’t keep up issue, and the others are just mainly expert opinions.
To be clear, I am definitely an AGI skeptic, and I very much believe that our current techniques of neural networks on GPUs is extremely inefficient, but this article doesn’t really add a lot to this discussion; it seems to self congratulate on the insights by a few others.
I wouldn't call it "game over." That's too harsh. The truth is, we don't know.
Sure, there's a ridiculous amount of hype, fueled by greed and FOMO, often justified by cargo-cultish science, but... progress in AI seems inevitable, because we have the human brain as physical proof that it's possible to build an intelligent machine with 100's of trillions of interconnections between neurons that consumes only about as much energy as an incandescent light bulb.
Today's largest AI models are still tiny in comparison, with only 1-2 trillion interconnections between neurons, each interconnection's weight specified by a parameter value. And these tiny AI models we have today consume many orders of magnitude more energy than a human brain. We have a long way to go, but we have proof that a human-brain equivalent is physically possible.
The timing of progress is of course unpredictable. Maybe we will need new breakthroughs. Maybe not. No one knows for sure. In any case, breakthroughs don't come along on a predictable schedule. It's possible we will go through a period of stagnation that lasts months, or even years. We cannot rule out another "AI winter" just because we don't want one.
Even if progress is punctuated by high peaks and deep valleys, I believe we'll get there, eventually.
Honestly, thank god. I hope we get more of this and it penetrates the zeitgeist so we can finally bring non-technical people back to earth. Folks, even on HN, are losing their damn minds over this tech. The writing has been on the wall for a while that there's not another breakthrough hiding in our current methodology. We invented the computer from Star Trek—that's an insane accomplishment, literally science fiction become reality. Maybe we can finally sit with that for a while instead of chasing the dragon. As we scale these AIs we're going to make a smarter Computer, we're not going to suddenly have Data. And that avenue is worth pursuing on its own.
I feel like even a human would also fail if given all data results but those for x and then get tested on x just as the function results differ from previously observed behavior.
Is it not more interesting to observe how the model(human or not) incorporates the new data to better match reality in the case of distribution shift or other irregular distributions and others
While Gary is very bearish on AI, I think there's some truth to his claims here though I disagree with how he got there. The problem I see with AI and AGI is not so much a technical problem as an economic one.
If we keep down our current trajectory of pouring billions on top of billions into AI then yes I think it would be plausible that in the next 10-20 years we will have a class of models that are "pseudo-AGI", that is we may not achieve true AGI but the models are going to be so good that it could well be considered AGI in many use cases.
But the problem I see is that this will require exponential growth and exponential spending and the wheels are already starting to catch fire. Currently we see many circular investments and unfortunately I see it as the beginning of the AI bubble bursting. The root of the issue is simply that these AI companies are spending 10x-100x or more on research than they bring in with revenue, OpenAI is spending ~$300B on AI training and infra while their revenue is ~$12B. At some point the money and patience from investors is going to run out and that is going to happen long before we reach AGI.
And I have to hand it to Sam Altman and others in the space that made the audacious bet that they could get to AGI before the music stops but from where I'm standing the song is about to come to an end and AGI is still very much in the future. Once the VC dollars dry up the timeline for AGI will likely get pushed another 20-30 years and that's assuming that there aren't other insurmountable technical hurdles along the way.
The karpathy interview struck me as fairly upbeat despite the extended 10 year timeline. That's really not a long time on something with "changes everything" potential...as proper working agents would be
Genuine question : why are hyperscalers like OpenAI and Oracle raising hundreds of billions ? Isn't their current infra enough ?
Naive napkin math : a GB200 NVL72 is 3M$, can serve ~7000 concurrent users of gpt4o (rumored to be 1400B A200B), and ChatGPT has ~10M concurrent peak users. That's only ~4B$ of infra.
Are they trying to brute-force AGI with larger models, knowing that gpt4.5 failed at this, and deepseek & qwen3 proved small MoE can reach frontier performance ? Or is my math 2 orders of magnitude off ?
I don't think AGI is imminent in a "few months"-inminent, but in a "few decades" imminent. Personally, I don't own stocks in any AI company, though I'll be affected if the bubble bursts because the world economy right now feels fragile.
But I'm hoping something good comes out of the real push to build more compute and to make it cheaper. Maybe a bunch of intrepid aficionados will use it to run biological simulations to make cats immortal, at which point I'll finally get a cat. And then I will be very happy.
I am horrified for what this might mean for the United States economy. I think all the investment in AI was that it was supposed to lead to this AGI and now that’s not gonna happen, what’s gonna happen to the investments that were made for the hopes of this being more than just slop generation?
As somebody who used to link to the occasional Marcus essay, this is a really poor "article" by a writer who has really declined to the point of boorishness. The contents here are just a list of talking points already mostly discussed on HN, so nothing new, and his over-familiar soapbox proclamations add nothing to the discourse.
Its not that he's wrong, I probably still have a great deal of sympathy with his position, but his approach is more suited to social media echo chambers than intelligent discussion.
I think it would be useful for him to take an extended break, and perhaps we could also do the same from him here.
We are already at agi yet no one seems to have noticed. Given its limited sense perception that makes chatgpt et al limited to talking with a partially blind, partially dead, quadraplegic, it has demonstrated and continues to demonstrate above average intelligence. Not sure what more needs to happen.
Sure we don't have embodied AI. Maybe it's not reflective enough. Maybe you find it jarring. Literally none of those things matter
TBH. I don't think we actually need AGI. It's not a win-win.. It's a civilization-altering double-edged sword with unclear consequences.
I'm quite satisfied with current LLM capabilities. Their lack of agency is actually a feature, not a bug.
An AGI would likely end up implementing some kind of global political agenda. IMO, the need to control things and move things in a specific, unified direction is a problem, not a solution.
With full agency, an AI would likely just take over the world and run it in ways which don't benefit anyone.
Agency manifests as thirst for power. Agency is man's inability to sit quietly in a room, by himself. This is a double-edged sword which becomes increasingly harmful once you run out of problems to solve... Then agency demands that new problems be invented.
Agency is not the same as consciousness or awareness. Too much agency can be dangerous.
We can't automate the meaning of life. Technology should facilitate us in pursuing what we individually decide to be meaningful. The individual must be given the freedom to decide their own purpose. If most individuals want to be used to fulfill some greater purpose (I.e. someone else's goals), so be it, but that should not be the compulsory plan for everyone.
I didn't know serious technical people were taking the AGI thing seriously. I figured it was just an "aim for the stars" goal where you try to get a bunch of smart people and capital invested into an idea, and everyone would still be happy if we got 25% of the way there.
sure, lots of things can be true at the same time without being mutually exclusive — the way I see it, it looks like there's great effort being made out there in how to characterize and propagate the collective understanding of tools — what's the goal there? is this a "call this something else please" type of work? in the spirit of metalinguistics, what do you call this branch of human nature and behaviour as it pertains to our evolution of knowledge and use of language to apply it as a species
like, we clearly are deriving some kind of value from the current AI as a product — are some researchers and scientists just unhappy that these companies are doing that by using marketing that doesn't comply with their world views?
does someone know of other similar parallels in history where perhaps the same happened? I'm sure we butchered words in different domains with complex meanings and I bet you some of these, looking back, are a bunch of nothing burgers
I think we need to distinguish among kinds of AGI, as the term has become overloaded and redefined over time. I'd argue we need to retire the term and use more appropriate terminology to distinguish between economic automation and human-like synthetic minds. I wrote a post about this here:
https://syntheticminds.substack.com/p/retiring-agi-two-paths...
The fact that anyone would think they would actually even consider releasing it when it's ready is amusing to me. Theres so much surveillance opportunities there. It is not going to be for the public.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 43.7 ms ] threadSymbolic AI has died a miserable death, and he never recovered from it.
Meanwhile, the technology continues to progress. The level of psychological self-defense is unironically more interesting than what he has to say.
Quite a wide variety of people find AI deeply ego threatening to the point of being brainwormed into spouting absolute nonsense, but why?
It makes sense when you look at this as a wider conversation. Every time Sam Altman, Elon Musk and co. predict that AGI is just around the corner, and their products will be smarter than all of humanity combined, and they are like having an expert in everything in your pocket; people like Gary Marcus are going to respond in just as extreme way in the opposite direction. Maybe if the AI billionaires with the planet-wide megaphones weren't so bombastic about their claims, certain other people wouldn't be so bombastic in their pushback.
1. For large players: AGI is a mission worth perusing at the cost of all existing profit (you won’t pay taxes today, the stock market values you on revenue anyway, and if you succeed you can control all people and means of production).
2. For regular people the current AI capabilities have already led to either life changing skill improvement for those who make things for themselves or life changing likely permanent employment reduction for those who do things for others. If current AI is sufficient to meaningfully reduce the employment market, AGI doesn’t matter much to regular people. Their life is altered and many will be looking for manual work until AI enters that too.
3. The AI vendors are running at tremendous expense right now and the sources of liquidity for billions and trillions are very very few. It is possible a black swan event in the markets causes an abrupt end to liquidity and thus forces AI providers into pricing that excludes many existing lower-end users. That train should not be taken for granted.
4. It is also possible WebGPU and other similar scale-ai-accross-devices efforts succeed and you get much more compute unlocked to replace Advertising.
Serious question: Who in HN is actually looking forward to AGI existing?
To be clear, I am definitely an AGI skeptic, and I very much believe that our current techniques of neural networks on GPUs is extremely inefficient, but this article doesn’t really add a lot to this discussion; it seems to self congratulate on the insights by a few others.
Sure, there's a ridiculous amount of hype, fueled by greed and FOMO, often justified by cargo-cultish science, but... progress in AI seems inevitable, because we have the human brain as physical proof that it's possible to build an intelligent machine with 100's of trillions of interconnections between neurons that consumes only about as much energy as an incandescent light bulb.
Today's largest AI models are still tiny in comparison, with only 1-2 trillion interconnections between neurons, each interconnection's weight specified by a parameter value. And these tiny AI models we have today consume many orders of magnitude more energy than a human brain. We have a long way to go, but we have proof that a human-brain equivalent is physically possible.
The timing of progress is of course unpredictable. Maybe we will need new breakthroughs. Maybe not. No one knows for sure. In any case, breakthroughs don't come along on a predictable schedule. It's possible we will go through a period of stagnation that lasts months, or even years. We cannot rule out another "AI winter" just because we don't want one.
Even if progress is punctuated by high peaks and deep valleys, I believe we'll get there, eventually.
If we keep down our current trajectory of pouring billions on top of billions into AI then yes I think it would be plausible that in the next 10-20 years we will have a class of models that are "pseudo-AGI", that is we may not achieve true AGI but the models are going to be so good that it could well be considered AGI in many use cases.
But the problem I see is that this will require exponential growth and exponential spending and the wheels are already starting to catch fire. Currently we see many circular investments and unfortunately I see it as the beginning of the AI bubble bursting. The root of the issue is simply that these AI companies are spending 10x-100x or more on research than they bring in with revenue, OpenAI is spending ~$300B on AI training and infra while their revenue is ~$12B. At some point the money and patience from investors is going to run out and that is going to happen long before we reach AGI.
And I have to hand it to Sam Altman and others in the space that made the audacious bet that they could get to AGI before the music stops but from where I'm standing the song is about to come to an end and AGI is still very much in the future. Once the VC dollars dry up the timeline for AGI will likely get pushed another 20-30 years and that's assuming that there aren't other insurmountable technical hurdles along the way.
Naive napkin math : a GB200 NVL72 is 3M$, can serve ~7000 concurrent users of gpt4o (rumored to be 1400B A200B), and ChatGPT has ~10M concurrent peak users. That's only ~4B$ of infra.
Are they trying to brute-force AGI with larger models, knowing that gpt4.5 failed at this, and deepseek & qwen3 proved small MoE can reach frontier performance ? Or is my math 2 orders of magnitude off ?
But I'm hoping something good comes out of the real push to build more compute and to make it cheaper. Maybe a bunch of intrepid aficionados will use it to run biological simulations to make cats immortal, at which point I'll finally get a cat. And then I will be very happy.
Its not that he's wrong, I probably still have a great deal of sympathy with his position, but his approach is more suited to social media echo chambers than intelligent discussion.
I think it would be useful for him to take an extended break, and perhaps we could also do the same from him here.
Sure we don't have embodied AI. Maybe it's not reflective enough. Maybe you find it jarring. Literally none of those things matter
I'm quite satisfied with current LLM capabilities. Their lack of agency is actually a feature, not a bug.
An AGI would likely end up implementing some kind of global political agenda. IMO, the need to control things and move things in a specific, unified direction is a problem, not a solution.
With full agency, an AI would likely just take over the world and run it in ways which don't benefit anyone.
Agency manifests as thirst for power. Agency is man's inability to sit quietly in a room, by himself. This is a double-edged sword which becomes increasingly harmful once you run out of problems to solve... Then agency demands that new problems be invented.
Agency is not the same as consciousness or awareness. Too much agency can be dangerous.
We can't automate the meaning of life. Technology should facilitate us in pursuing what we individually decide to be meaningful. The individual must be given the freedom to decide their own purpose. If most individuals want to be used to fulfill some greater purpose (I.e. someone else's goals), so be it, but that should not be the compulsory plan for everyone.
like, we clearly are deriving some kind of value from the current AI as a product — are some researchers and scientists just unhappy that these companies are doing that by using marketing that doesn't comply with their world views?
does someone know of other similar parallels in history where perhaps the same happened? I'm sure we butchered words in different domains with complex meanings and I bet you some of these, looking back, are a bunch of nothing burgers
Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45619329