AI Is Dumber Than Investors Think — ft. Gary Marcus

**Ed Elson** (0:00)
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**Ed Elson** (2:11)
Welcome to Prof G Markets. We've spent a lot of time talking about AI lately, from the Trump administration's export restrictions on Anthropics models to the ongoing questions surrounding the economics of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Taken together, these stories point to two fundamental questions. One, is the AI boom financially sustainable? And two, are we moving too quickly with a technology that we don't fully understand? Few people have been asking those questions longer than our next guest. Long before concerns about AI safety regulation and business models entered the mainstream, he was warning about the technology's limitations and challenging some of the industry's most ambitious claims. He has testified before the Senate on the risks posed by AI. He's founded a machine learning company that was acquired by Uber, and is now one of the field's most prominent skeptical voices. So here's our conversation with Gary Marcus, AI skeptic, author, and professor at NYU Stern. Gary, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. You are one of the original critics of AI, and that's quite interesting because you work in AI. You started a machine learning company, which I think you could say is an AI company.
You've done a lot of AI research.
You are part of the AI world, but you have issues with it. Let's just start broad. What are your concerns?

**Gary Marcus** (3:45)
Well, my concerns are we're all in on a particular technology that I think is inelegant, harmful, not where we should wind up, and being abused by the people that are using it. So I want AI to succeed, but I think we wound up down this really dangerous path. So you think about the Star Trek computer, you ask it a question, it gives you an answer that you can count on.
Presumably, it's not done to wreck society, it's done to help people.
Well, what we actually have is everybody running around LLMs, which are inherently unreliable, they're unpredictable, they can't be aligned to human values. And they're being run by companies that don't seem to really give a shit about the consequences for what they're building for society. It's like a nightmare for those of us who have worked in AI to suddenly see what we're building be used in so many bad ways and with people really not caring. You know, we should want a more reliable technology that we can really count on, that is compatible with humanity. You know, five years ago, that didn't seem out of the question.
Five years ago, the field was healthy. It was considering lots of different things. Wasn't driven so much by money, but by intellectual curiosity. How do you make a machine that's intelligent? And everything changed when people started to realize that there might be money to be made. Still not clear that there actually is money to be made, by the way, right? And I'm sure we'll get into that because we have very similar views about that. But the thought, the scent of money, possibly misguided sense of money, really changed how the field grew. And it's also a technical thing. Transformers are interesting and people got into them. But fundamentally, I think it's the scent of money really changed how people built AI, how they thought about it, what they wanted to do with it, who was running it. I think a lot of grifters came in that don't even necessarily have a technical understanding of the questions and do a lot of lying and hyping about what their things might actually do. And it's just really been unpleasant for the last several years being honest about it. And it's not because I don't want AI to succeed. I still think that there's a chance that AI could help a lot in medicine, that it could help with all kinds of technologies. I would still like to see AI succeed, but not on the path that we are right now. This is just not a good path.