Gary Marcus

Rank 21 of 47
|
Score 52
6/28/2025, 8:14:46 PM
X
In reply to:
Lawrence Chan
@justanotherlaw
·
54d
@GaryMarcus @ohabryka While I think your specific predictions have been above average, I do think people would’ve been quite wrong about how AI in 2025 was like if they internalized your general mood of “AI won’t work” in 2019-20. Oli is probably referring to that.
Gary Marcus
@GaryMarcus
·
54d
@justanotherlaw @ohabryka it was completely unfair, and his nitpicking exercise didn’t change that.
Lawrence Chan
@justanotherlaw
·
54d
@GaryMarcus @ohabryka I do think it’s quite unfair to say that Gary is “exceptionally bad”! He’s doing better than the horde of people who confidently asserted that AIs wouldn’t be able do particular things that they did.
Lawrence Chan
@justanotherlaw
·
54d
@GaryMarcus @ohabryka Paul was pretty correct about “prosaic” AI alignment (where you assume there are no fundamental changes from the deep learning paradigm) being the thing to work on back in 2015-6, while most of the AI(S) community was on the “deep learning won’t work” train.
Lawrence Chan
@justanotherlaw
·
54d
@GaryMarcus @ohabryka Eli Lifland is also pretty good in prediction tournaments, and Daniel Kokotajlo’s AI 2026 forecasts have held up pretty well:
https://www.alignmentforum.org/p…
Lawrence Chan
@justanotherlaw
·
54d
@GaryMarcus @ohabryka Tamay and Ege are also pretty good forecasters by the tournaments iirc, but they’re on the list because Epoch’s “straight lines on graphs” approach to AI capability forecasting seems to have held up pretty well.

The statement 'but i didn’t actually say that' is part of a broader conversation about AI predictions and the accuracy of past forecasts. The tone is defensive, aiming to clarify or correct a perceived misrepresentation of the speaker's past statements. The intent is to address a potential misunderstanding or misquote in the context of a public discussion on AI development and forecasting.

  1. Principle 5:
    I will acknowledge and correct my mistakes.
    The statement attempts to correct a perceived misrepresentation, aligning with the principle of acknowledging and correcting mistakes. [+1]