Gary Marcus

Rank 13 of 47
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Score 83
5/18/2025, 12:04:06 AM
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In reply to:
Daniel Litt
@littmath
·
240d
@colin_fraser @GaryMarcus @MelMitchell1 @rao2z I don’t really have a good model for what they’ll be good and bad at. Certainly if you ask them to do a huge number of arithmetic operations in a row you’re probably in trouble.
Colin Fraser
@colin_fraser
·
240d
@littmath @GaryMarcus @MelMitchell1 @rao2z I think we’ve talked about this before and you disagreed with me but I’ll ask again; I’ve found the hallmark of problems that they do badly at is they involve a lot of “busywork”—trying many cases, finding the correct path out of many possible options, etc. Do you find this?
Daniel Litt
@littmath
·
240d
@GaryMarcus @colin_fraser @MelMitchell1 @rao2z Let me put it this way—they can very reliably solve some out-of-distribution hard problems that humans can’t reliably solve. Being able to solve *all* problems is not a pre-condition for intelligence; otherwise people aren’t intelligent.
Gary Marcus
@GaryMarcus
·
240d
@littmath @colin_fraser @MelMitchell1 @rao2z Some, but not reliably. They can’t even solve large multiplication problems reliably.

LLMs exceed their predecessors but demonstrably still have not solved this problem, which is most clear when the training set is known, and when direct data augmentation is not possible.

Some
Daniel Litt
@littmath
·
240d
@GaryMarcus @colin_fraser @MelMitchell1 @rao2z They’re clearly generalizing out of distribution. E.g. they can solve some novel math problems.
Gary Marcus
@GaryMarcus
·
240d
@littmath New situations is clearly the weakness in these approaches, and has been forever.

@colin_fraser has documented this endlessly, informally; I gave the intuitions behind that in 1998. The recent Apple reasoning paper, the studies of @MelMitchell1 and @rao2z etc reinforce it.

The

The statement 'Calculators get no respect' is part of a broader conversation about the capabilities and limitations of AI models, particularly in solving mathematical problems. This discussion involves public figures in the AI and mathematics fields and addresses the public issue of AI's role and effectiveness in problem-solving, making it a part of public discourse.

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    The statement uses humor to promote understanding of the limitations of AI, which can foster empathy and compassion for those working with these technologies. [+1]
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