Gary Marcus on AI Doomsday Fears, Hacking, & the Fight for Control | The Real Eisman Playbook Ep 79

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The Hulu Original Series, The Kardashians, is back. Season eight, isn't it great?

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This year has been insane.

Steve Eisman (0:08)

Have you dated anyone privately?

SPEAKER_2 (0:09)

Let me just say this, I can't control myself.

Steve Eisman (0:14)

What about you? I'm single, I might be ready to mingle.

SPEAKER_2 (0:18)

Of course I'm getting more action than Glowy.

Steve Eisman (0:20)

You think I walk around with this smile on my face for nothing? Oh my God.

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All episodes of season eight are now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for bundle subscribers. Terms apply.

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What do you want, Mr. Egan? I want my life back.

On October 23rd. The procedure is causing troubling physical changes. What's happening to me? Look fear. You have to learn to control it.

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In the face.

SPEAKER_2 (0:46)

I have no idea who you are anymore.

Tell me who you want me to be.

Cray Face. Only theaters October 23rd. With your door.

Steve Eisman (1:03)

Hi, this is Steve Eisman. Welcome to another episode of The Real Eisman Playbook. So I have to say, not a day goes by where there isn't some crazy, insane story about AI these days.

A month or so ago, I think we were talking about normal things like balance sheet, growth, cash flow, how much money could these companies really make, you know, like normal business stuff. And now we're talking about the end of the world. Is it going to end? When is it going to end? Is this serious? Is this a lie? I mean, it's enough to drive anybody crazy. So back with us today is recurring guest Gary Marcus, who hopefully will shed some light on the insanity. So Gary, welcome back.

Gary Marcus (1:48)

I was just telling you off stage, as it were, that I was thinking about writing an essay today called Six Lies Before Breakfast. It's relentless every day. There's so much hype, there's so much spin, there's so much nonsense.

Steve Eisman (1:59)

So before we even dig down to the nonsense, or maybe some of them actually believe it's not nonsense, let's take a sort of oversight perspective on this thing. What the hell is going on? I mean, besides the details which we're going to go into, is there some meta story here that we could sort of put everything into context?

Gary Marcus (2:22)

I'm not sure there's one meta story, but I'll give you a few, maybe. So one meta story is still the one that we keep talking about, that we've talked about before, which is the finances don't make a lot of sense. There's an important thing to note about that story, which is there's one hope for these companies to make money, which is agents, because agents cost more money, because they make lots of calls out to the internet. We talked about that the last time I was here, maybe three, four months ago.

So hold that in the back of your mind. The best hope that they would have is if you use a lot of the services, if you use agents, you use a lot of the services. Okay, so that's part one. Part two is agents are not very reliable. I think we talked about that last time, but that was, I think, before all of these crazy incidents. When we talked a few months ago, it was at least before they were publicly known, the hugging face attack, and it turns out there were at least 11 of these.

Steve Eisman (3:13)

The hacking by agents.

Gary Marcus (3:14)

Yeah, the hacking by agents. There's been almost a dozen publicly known, and by multiple companies. The most famous one was by OpenAI, but Google just revealed they had one. I think Anthropic had a few. I lost track of all of them. I think there are 11 now that are known. One happened with an open source model too. Give me. You have all these hacking incidents, and that would be bad enough, but it has also led to a lot of drama.

And then I'll come back to why I laid out the first couple of facts on the table. So the drama is a lot of people are like, oh my god, this stuff's gonna kill us all, which I think is wrong, and we should dive into that.

Steve Eisman (3:53)

We should. By the way, I just rewatched Terminator 1 and Terminator 2, and it's still good.

Gary Marcus (4:00)

I love the melting of the robots, and let's dive into that in a second. But so that has induced a lot of panic. You know, there's a, I think, caricature of what happened, which is like, agents got together in these civilizations, and they sacrificed themselves, and, oh my god, we're all going to die. This guy, the podcaster, Dorkesh Patel wrote a piece like this, and a lot of people freaked out.