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> says Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist who sold an AI startup to Uber in 2016

for context, Marcus has a quite bearish view on AI and lots of others, most prominently Yann LeCun, disagree with Marcus.

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I’m sure Yann disagrees

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair

This is precisely what so many do not get when they are arguing against independent, skeptical academics or scientists. The academics/scientists get basically nothing from their position. Sure, they get papers and maybe tenure and so on, but they can get those holding either position. Meanwhile, on the other side we have people with literally millions riding on the position. I wonder who will provide a better unbiased take?

This is further muddied in the LLM debate, as we have a generation (of mostly nerdy middle class white men) who grew up on sci-fi desperately want their boyhood fantasies to come true. I was one of them, but I got over it - we're not colonizing Mars to save humanity and an LLM is not anything resembling AGI. People not invested in the narrative can see that LLMs, while amazing at generating sensible sounding text, are not even remotely close to reasoning AGI.

Get some new material, seen this one before

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