As a journalist, one thing I appreciate about Gary Marcus is that he always makes time for a chat. The last time we met face-to-face was late last year in New York City, where he fit me in between a series of press interviews, including NPR, CNN, the BBC, and the Big Kahuna, a taping of 60 Minutes with Leslie Stahl.
When I called Marcus this week for an update on his Never Ending Tour to critique AI, he made sure to Zoom with me the next day, tweaking his schedule to avoid conflict with a Morning Joe hit. It was a good day for Marcus: the New York Times Sunday Magazine had just gone online with a lengthy Marcus interview conducted by its talk maven, David Marchese, whose previous subjects have included Thomas Piketty, Tom Stoppard, and Iggy Pop.
The success of large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and a host of others has been so spectacular that it’s literally scary. This week President Biden summoned the lords of AI to figure out what to do about it. Even some of the people building models, like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, recommend some form of regulation. And the discussion is a global one; Italy even banned OpenAI’s bot for a while.
The sudden urgency about the benefits and evils of AI has made it a sufficiently hot media topic to create an instant demand for camera-ready experts—particularly those who have takes hot enough to sustain an extended sound bite. It is a moment made for Marcus, a 53-year-old entrepreneur and NYU professor emeritus who now lives in Vancouver, coincidentally the site of his recent TED talk on constraining AI. In addition to his inevitable Substack “The Road to A.I. We Can Trust” and his podcast Humans vs. Machines—currently number 6 on Apple’s chart for tech pods—Marcus has ascended to become one of the go-to talking heads on this breakout topic, in such demand that one applauds his restraint in not creating a Marcus-bot so he could share his AI concerns with Andrew Ross Sorkin and Anderson Cooper at the same time.
Marcus’ résumé makes him an unusual, though not unqualified, candidate as a spokes-expert in AI (though some people dispute his bona fides). For his 23 years at NYU, he was in psychology, not computer science. But he’s been fascinated with minds and machines since he was 8 years old and was sufficiently schooled in the topic to cofound an AI company called Geometric Intelligence. In 2016 he sold the firm to Uber, then for a short period became then-CEO Travis Kalanick’s AI czar, not a great credential for someone arguing for responsibility in the field. But Marcus didn’t stick around at Uber, and he later cofounded a robotics firm, Robust AI, which he left in 2021.
While pursuing his interests in AI, Marcus presented himself as a skeptic of what was becoming the dominant technology in the field—deep learning neural networks. He argued that collections of mathematical nodes with weird black-box behavior were overrated and that there was still a critical role for old-school AI, based on reasoning and logic. At one point he publicly debated his fellow NYU professor Yann LeCun, a deep learning pioneer who is Meta’s chief AI scientist and a recent Turing Award recipient, on the subject. The debate was gentlemanly on both sides, but later, Marcus’ insistence that the accomplishments of deep learning were overrated led to gloves coming off and a sniping war between the two, conducted in part via Twitter. LeCun’s responses to Marcus’ jibes at deep learning generally expressed the view that Marcus doesn’t know what he’s talking about. “I don’t engage in vacuous debates,” LeCun once tweeted, after Marcus asked him to respond to some charge on deep learning’s limitations. “I build stuff. You should try it sometimes.” (LeCun demurred when invited to comment on Marcus for this column.)