Gary Marcus

from May 2024, no less!

As skepticism of AI deepens, we keep coming back to this Gary Marcus interview from May — where he argued OpenAI would be “the WeWork of AI.”

@cnbc.com @garymarcus.bsky.social
www.cnbc.com/video/2024/0...

👉Softbank sells entire Nvidia position.

👉Oracle debt downgraded.

👉Meta financing games revealed.

👉OpenAI CEO @sama couldn’t explain how company would meet its $1.4 T obligations.

👉Coreweave drops 20% in a week.

You do the math.

Is vibe coding dying? Amateurs might not be replacing teams of coders, after all

Whether you’re an AI skeptic, an AI evangelist, or just someone who wants to know what’s happening on the cutting edge of tech, you should be reading @garymarcus.bsky.social.

Vibe coding? It’s dying. I am shocked. SHOCKED, I tell you.

garymarcus.substack.com/p/is-vibe-co...

Opinion | Chatbots Are a Waste of A.I.’s Real Potential Generative A.I. can do many things human beings can do. But that misses the point about how A.I. can truly benefit us.

"Right now, it feels as if Big Tech is throwing general-purpose A.I. spaghetti at the wall and hoping that nothing truly terrible sticks."

@garymarcus.bsky.social, the author of "Taming Silicon Valley," writes on the race toward A.G.I. for @nytimes.com:

Just watched @garymarcus.bsky.social give a blistering talk online for 75th Anniversary of the Turing Test event today. I so so wish I could get my students (and HE management) to watch this. AI realism is desperately needed. I have students saying they like AI because it can ‘think’ NO NO NO NO NO

Is AI really on an exponential curve, or is that hype?
@garymarcus.bsky.social argues GPT-5 proves the curve has flattened. Scaling isn’t delivering exponential gains anymore and the field is shifting to smaller or hybrid models.
Are we past exponential AI, or just in a slowdown? #academisky #ai

Game over for pure LLMs. Even Turing Award Winner Rich Sutton has gotten off the bus. One by one, all the big names have turned around. What should we do next?

Turing Award laureate Rich Sutton now critiques pure LLMs—echoing @garymarcus.bsky.social . Time to move beyond science fiction and refocus on scientific rigour. #AI #LLM #Neurosymbolic #RichSutton #GaryMarcus

garymarcus.substack.com/p/game-over-...

Game over for pure LLMs. Even Turing Award Winner Rich Sutton has gotten off the bus. One by one, all the big names have turned around. What should we do next?

‘Practically the only people still pretending scaling LLMs is “all you need” are grifters.’ garymarcus.substack.com/p/game-over-... by @garymarcus.bsky.social

The reason why LLMs fail to play a game of chess, even though they can cite the rules from their training data, is an awesome example of what's stopping autonomous AI agents from being reliable.

Great discussion between @garrykasparov.bsky.social ♟️ and @garymarcus.bsky.social 🧠 on limits of GenAI.

Opinion | The Fever Dream of Imminent Superintelligence Is Finally Breaking Building bigger A.I. isn’t leading to better A.I.

"The chances of #AGI’s arrival by 2027 now seem remote. The government has let #AI companies lead a charmed life, with almost zero #regulation. It now ought to enact legislation that addresses costs and harms unfairly offloaded onto the public." ~ @garymarcus.bsky.social

“Did people promising to build potential future greenhouses for tulip-growers in 1636 ever have it so good?” garymarcus.substack.com/p/peak-bubbl... by @garymarcus.bsky.social

AI and the Rise of Techno-Fascism in the United States Will powerful new tools be used to promote democracy or undermine it?

"Power has really gone to the tech companies, who have enormous influence over the government. And unless people get out of their apathy, that’s ... certainly where the U.S. is likely to stay."

@garymarcus.bsky.social discussed what we need to do to prevent AI tools from undermining democracy:

AI and the Rise of Techno-Fascism in the United States Will powerful new tools be used to promote democracy or undermine it?

Gary Kasparov (legendary Chess Player) & @garymarcus.bsky.social are having a sobering conversation about AI, LLMs and Deepblue in this @theatlantic.com piece.

Many people believe generative or any AI show signs of "intelligence", but Marcus attributes it to brute forcing with pattern recognition.

M365 Copilot fails to up productivity in UK government trial : AI tech shows promise writing emails or summarizing meetings. Don't bother with anything more complex

Two trials will be repeated endlessly despite always producing the same results:

1) Does UBI work? (yes)
2) Does AI improve productivity? (no)

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

AI and the Rise of Techno-Fascism in the United States Will powerful new tools be used to promote democracy or undermine it?

When tech is built to replace and not empower people, the future of work & democracy is at risk.

@garymarcus.bsky.social sounds the alarm about unchecked AI and discusses how we can reclaim tech for the public good. #GoodLife https://bit.ly/4nBRcPh

Opinion | The Fever Dream of Imminent ‘Superintelligence’ Is Finally Breaking

‘The current strategy of merely making A.I. bigger is deeply flawed — scientifically, economically and politically.’ www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/o... by @garymarcus.bsky.social

Opinion | How to Rethink A.I.

"The government has let A.I. companies lead a charmed life with almost zero regulation. It now ought to enact legislation that addresses costs and harms unfairly offloaded onto the public," argues @garymarcus.bsky.social.

In the morning @nytimes: Where I think AI has gone wrong — and what we should do about it.

Anybody remember AI a month ago?

• Everybody in the Bay Area seemed to think that AGI was imminent
• Expectations for GPT-5 were through the roof
• Zuckerberg was spending bajillions of dollars on Alexandr Wang, staff and GPUs, and seemed to have a coherent plan

What scaling does and doesn’t buy you: peeling back the hype surrounding Google‘s trendy Nano Banana Some things never change

What scaling does and doesn’t buy you: peeling back the hype surrounding Google‘s trendy Nano Banana

"But it’s all still just an extended form of mimicry, not something deeper, as the persistent failures with parts and wholes keep showing us." ~ @garymarcus.bsky.social

garymarcus.substack....

#AI

not an April Fool’s joke, not the
Onion

possibly among the most dangerous PACs in history.

'It's almost tragic': Bubble or not, the AI backlash is validating one critic's warnings Gary Marcus told Fortune that AI valuations remind him of Wile E Coyote. "We are off the cliff."

“This entire market has been based on people not understanding that these machines don’t actually work like you, imagining that scaling was going to solve all of this, because they don’t really understand the problem. I mean, it’s almost tragic.” - @garymarcus.bsky.social fortune.com/2025/08/24/i...

Sam Altman Places Gun To Head After New GPT Claims Dogs Are Crustaceans For 60th Time

Sam Altman Places Gun To Head After New GPT Claims Dogs Are Crustaceans For 60th Time theonion.com/sam-alt...

that would fuck with their narrative

Breaking: Sam Altman admits they “totally screwed up” the GPT-5 launch - and shamelessly asks for a LOT more good money to chase after bad.

“.. Fears of a bubble are mounting, as tech stocks follow a pattern that is ‘surprisingly similar’ to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s ..”

@bloomberg.com $QQQ
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...