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Gary Marcus

March 31, 2025 AGI Curators

Summary

Gary Marcus is a leading voice in artificial intelligence. He is a scientist, best-selling author, and serial entrepreneur (Founder of Robust.AI and Geometric.AI, acquired by Uber). He is well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance, and for his research in human language development and cognitive neuroscience.

An Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU, he is the author of five books, including, The Algebraic Mind, Kluge, The Birth of the Mind, and the New York Times Bestseller Guitar Zero. He has often contributed to The New Yorker, Wired, and The New York Times. His most recent book, Rebooting AI, with Ernest Davis, is one of Forbes’s 7 Must Read Books in AI.

Source: Website

OnAir Post: Gary Marcus

News

GenAI’s day of reckoning may have come: It’s not just the stock price
Marcus on AI, Gary Marcus – March 27, 2025

GenAI is never going to disappear. The tools have their uses. But the economics do not and have not ever made sense, relative to the realities of the techonology. I have been writing about the dubious economics for a long time, since my August 2023 piece here on whether Generative AI would prove to be a dud. (My warnings about the technical limits, such as hallucinations and reasoning errors, go back to my 2001 book, The Algebraic Mind, and 1998 article in Cognitive Psychology).

The Future of AI is not GenAI
Importantly, though, GenAI is just one form of AI among the many that might be imagined. GenAI is an approach that is enormously popular, but one that is neither reliable nor particularly well-grounded in truth.

Different, yet-to-be-developed approaches, with a firmer connection to the world of symbolic AI (perhaps hybrid neurosymbolic models) might well prove to be vastly more valuable. I genuinely believe arguments from Stuart Russell and others that AI could someday be a trillion dollar annual market.

But unlocking that market will require something new: a different kind of AI that is reliable and trustworthy.

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About

Wiki biography

Gary Fred Marcus (born 1970) is an American psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author, known for his research on the intersection of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence (AI).

Marcus is professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University. In 2014 he founded Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company later acquired by Uber.

His books include The Algebraic Mind, Kluge, The Birth of the Mind, and the New York Times Bestseller Guitar Zero.

Early life

Marcus was born into a Jewish family in Baltimore, Maryland. He developed an early fascination with artificial intelligence and began coding at a young age.

Marcus majored in cognitive science at Hampshire College. He continued on to graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he conducted research on negative evidence in language acquisition and regularization (and over-regularization) in children’s acquisition of grammatical morphology.

During his PhD studies at MIT, he was mentored by Steven Pinker.

Career

In 2015 Marcus co-founded a machine-learning startup, Geometric Intelligence. When Geometric Intelligence was acquired by Uber in December 2016, he became the director of Uber’s AI efforts, but left the company in March 2017.

In 2019 Marcus launched the startup, Robust.AI, with Rodney Brooks, iRobot co-founder and co-inventor of the Roomba. Robust.AI aims to build an “off-the-shelf” machine-learning platform for adoption in autonomous robots, similar to the way video-game engines can be adopted by third-party game developers.

Source: Wikipedia

Web Links

Books

Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure That AI Works for Us

Source: Amazon

How Big Tech is taking advantage of us, how AI is making it worse, and how we can create a thriving, AI-positive world.

On balance, will AI help humanity or harm it? AI could revolutionize science, medicine, and technology, and deliver us a world of abundance and better health. Or it could be a disaster, leading to the downfall of democracy, or even our extinction. In Taming Silicon Valley, Gary Marcus, one of the most trusted voices in AI, explains that we still have a choice. And that the decisions we make now about AI will shape our next century. In this short but powerful manifesto, Marcus explains how Big Tech is taking advantage of us, how AI could make things much worse, and, most importantly, what we can do to safeguard our democracy, our society, and our future.

Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust

Source: Amazon

Two leaders in the field offer a compelling analysis of the current state of the art and reveal the steps we must take to achieve a robust artificial intelligence that can make our lives better.

“Finally, a book that tells us what AI is, what AI is not, and what AI could become if only we are ambitious and creative enough.” —Garry Kasparov, former world chess champion and author of Deep Thinking

Despite the hype surrounding AI, creating an intelligence that rivals or exceeds human levels is far more complicated than we have been led to believe. Professors Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis have spent their careers at the forefront of AI research and have witnessed some of the greatest milestones in the field, but they argue that a computer beating a human in Jeopardy! does not signal that we are on the doorstep of fully autonomous cars or superintelligent machines. The achievements in the field thus far have occurred in closed systems with fixed sets of rules, and these approaches are too narrow to achieve genuine intelligence.

Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind

Source: Amazon

Psychology professor Gary Marcus explores how evolution has affected—and altered—the functioning of the human brain in Kluge.

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

How is it that we can recognize photos from our high school yearbook decades later, but cannot remember what we ate for breakfast yesterday? And why are we inclined to buy more cans of soup if the sign says Limit 12 Per Customer rather than Limit 4 Per Customer?

In Kluge, psychology professor Gary Marcus argues convincingly that our minds are not as elegantly designed as we may believe. The imperfections result from a haphazard evolutionary process that often proceeds by piling new systems on top of old ones—and those systems don’t always work well together. The end product is a “kluge,” a clumsy, cobbled-together contraption.

More Information

Wikipedia

Gary Fred Marcus (born 1970) is an American psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author, known for his research on the intersection of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence (AI).[1][2]

Marcus is professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University. In 2014 he founded Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company later acquired by Uber.[3][4]

His books include The Algebraic Mind, Kluge, The Birth of the Mind, and the New York Times Bestseller Guitar Zero.[5]

Early life

Marcus was born into a Jewish family in Baltimore, Maryland. He developed an early fascination with artificial intelligence and began coding at a young age.[6]

Marcus majored in cognitive science at Hampshire College.[7] He continued on to graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he conducted research on negative evidence in language acquisition[8] and regularization (and over-regularization) in children’s acquisition of grammatical morphology.[9]

During his PhD studies at MIT, he was mentored by Steven Pinker.[10]

Career

In 2015 Marcus co-founded a machine-learning startup, Geometric Intelligence. When Geometric Intelligence was acquired by Uber in December 2016, he became the director of Uber’s AI efforts, but left the company in March 2017.[11][12]

In 2019 Marcus launched the startup, Robust.AI, with Rodney Brooks, iRobot co-founder and co-inventor of the Roomba. Robust.AI aims to build an “off-the-shelf” machine-learning platform for adoption in autonomous robots, similar to the way video-game engines can be adopted by third-party game developers.[13][10]

Research

Marcus’s early work focused on why children produce over-regularizations, such as “breaked” and “goed”, as a test case for the nature of mental rules.[14]

In his first book, The Algebraic Mind (2001), Marcus challenged the idea that the mind might consist of largely undifferentiated neural networks. He argued that understanding the mind would require integrating connectionism with classical ideas about symbol-manipulation.[15]

Marcus’s book, Guitar Zero (2012), explores the process of taking up a musical instrument as an adult.

Marcus edited The Norton Psychology Reader (2005), including selections by cognitive scientists on modern science of the human mind.

With Jeremy Freeman he co-edited The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World’s Leading Neuroscientists (2014).

Language and mind

Marcus belongs to the school of thought of psychological nativism. One of his books, The Birth of the Mind (2004), describes from a nativist perspective the ways that genes can influence cognitive development, and aims to reconcile nativism with common anti-nativist arguments advanced by other academics. He discusses how a small number of genes account for the intricate human brain, common false impressions of genes, and the problems they[clarification needed] may cause for the future of genetic engineering.[16]

In a review, Mameli and Papineau argue that the theory expounded in the book is “more sophisticated than any version of nativism on the market”, but that in attempting to rebut anti-nativist arguments, Marcus “ends up reconfiguring the nativist position out of existence”, prompting Mameli and Papineau to conclude that the nativist-anti-nativist framing should “be abandoned”.[17]

Artificial intelligence

Marcus is a notable critic of the “hype” surrounding artificial intelligence.[10] He has called for regulation of AI, increased AI literacy among the public, and “well-funded public thinktanks” to consider potential AI risks.[18][19] He has also argued that AI is currently being deployed prematurely, particularly in situations that involve a risk of real-world harm resulting from bias, as with facial recognition or résumé parsing, since current deep-learning techniques are not amenable to formal verification for correctness.[20]

Marcus has described current large language models as “approximations to […] language use rather than language understanding”.[10]

On 29 March 2023, Marcus and other researchers signed an open letter calling for a 6-month moratorium on “the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4” until proper safeguards can be implemented,[21][22] primarily citing the short-term risks of “mediocre AI that is unreliable […] but widely deployed”.[23] In 2024 he rushed into press his latest book urging public action to regulate generative AI.[24]

Partial bibliography

Books

  • Marcus, G. F. (2024). Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure That AI Works for Us. MIT Press.
  • Marcus, G.; Davis, E. (2019). Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust. Pantheon/Random House.
  • Marcus, G.; Freeman, J. (ed.) (2014). The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World’s Leading Neuroscientists. Princeton University Press.
  • Marcus, G. F. (2012). Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning. The Penguin Press.
  • Marcus, G. F. (2008). Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind. Houghton Mifflin.
  • Marcus, G. F. (ed.) (2006). The Norton Psychology Reader. W. W. Norton.
  • Marcus, G. F. (2004). The Birth of The Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought. Basic Books.
  • Marcus, G. F. (2001). The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science. MIT Press.
  • Marcus, G. F., Pinker, S., Ullman, M., Hollander, M., Rosen, T. J., Xu, F., & Clahsen, H. (1992). Overregularization in language acquisition. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 57(4), i-178.

Articles

  • Marcus, Gary, “Artificial Confidence: Even the newest, buzziest systems of artificial general intelligence are stymied by the same old problems”, Scientific American, vol. 327, no. 4 (October 2022), pp. 42–45.
  • Marcus, Gary, “Am I Human?: Researchers need new ways to distinguish artificial intelligence from the natural kind”, Scientific American, vol. 316, no. 3 (March 2017), pp. 58–63.
  • Marcus, G. F., & Davis, E. (2013). How robust are probabilistic models of higher-level cognition? Psychological Science, 24(12), 2351–2360.
  • Marcus, G. F., Fernandes, K. J., & Johnson, S. P. (2007). Infant rule learning facilitated by speech. Psychological Science, 18(5), 387–391.
  • Marcus, G. F. (2006). Cognitive architecture and descent with modification. Cognition, 101(2), 443–465.
  • Marcus, G. F., & Fisher, S. E. (2003). FOXP2 in focus: what can genes tell us about speech and language? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(6), 257–262.
  • Marcus, G. F., Vijayan, S., Bandi Rao, S., & Vishton, P. M. (1999). Rule learning by seven-month-old infants. Science, 283(5398), 77–80.
  • Marcus, G. F. (1998). Rethinking eliminative connectionism. Cognitive Psychology, 37(3), 243–282.
  • Marcus, G. F., Brinkmann, U., Clahsen, H., Wiese, R., & Pinker, S. (1995). German inflection: The exception that proves the rule. Cognitive Psychology, 29(3), 189–256.

References

  1. ^ A Skeptical Take on the A.I. Revolution, retrieved 11 January 2023
  2. ^ “Machines that think like humans: Everything to know about AGI and AI Debate 3”. ZDNET. Retrieved 11 January 2023.
  3. ^ Etherington, Darrell (5 December 2016). “Uber acquires Geometric Intelligence to create an AI lab”. TechCrunch. Retrieved 11 January 2023.
  4. ^ “Uber Bets on Artificial Intelligence With Acquisition and New Lab”. The New York Times. 5 December 2016. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  5. ^ “Editors’ Choice – Book Review”. The New York Times. 4 May 2008. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 20 May 2018.
  6. ^ ““This is the teenage phase of AI. Tools with extraordinary power that are completely unreliable”“. ctech. 8 May 2023. Retrieved 19 December 2023.
  7. ^ “Gary Marcus 86F”. Hampshire College. Retrieved 11 January 2023.
  8. ^ Marcus, Gary F. (1 January 1993). “Negative evidence in language acquisition”. Cognition. 46 (1): 53–85. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(93)90022-N. ISSN 0010-0277. PMID 8432090. S2CID 23458757.
  9. ^ Marcus, Gary F. (1995). “Children’s overregularization of English plurals: a quantitative analysis*”. Journal of Child Language. 22 (2): 447–459. doi:10.1017/S0305000900009879. ISSN 1469-7602. PMID 8550732. S2CID 46561477.
  10. ^ a b c d Anadiotis, George (12 November 2020). “What’s next for AI: Gary Marcus talks about the journey toward robust artificial intelligence”. ZDNet. Retrieved 30 March 2023.
  11. ^ Bhuiyan, Johana (8 March 2017). “Uber’s new head of its AI labs has stepped down from his role”. Vox. Retrieved 30 March 2023.
  12. ^ Fried, Ina (8 March 2017). “The head of Uber’s AI labs is latest to leave the company”. Axios. Retrieved 30 March 2023.
  13. ^ Feldman, Amy. “Startup Founded By Cognitive Scientist Gary Marcus And Roboticist Rodney Brooks Raises $15 Million To Make Building Smarter Robots Easier”. Forbes. Retrieved 30 March 2023.
  14. ^ Marcus, G. F., Pinker, S., Ullman, M., Hollander, M., Rosen, T. J., and Xu, F. (1992). Overregularization in Language Acquisition. (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development). 57 (4, Serial No. 228).
    SRCD monograph?
  15. ^ Marcus, G.F., The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2001.
  16. ^ Marcus, G.F., The Birth of The Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought, New York, Basic Books, 2004.
  17. ^ Mameli, Matteo; Papineau, David (1 September 2006). “The new nativism: a commentary on Gary Marcus’s The birth of the mind”. Biology and Philosophy. 21 (4): 559–573. doi:10.1007/s10539-005-1800-7. ISSN 1572-8404. S2CID 59464488.
  18. ^ Marcus, Gary (7 August 2022). “Siri or Skynet? How to separate AI fact from fiction”. The Observer. ISSN 0029-7712. Retrieved 31 March 2023.
  19. ^ “The world needs an international agency for artificial intelligence, say two AI experts”. The Economist. ISSN 0013-0613. Retrieved 22 December 2023.
  20. ^ Georges, Benoît (26 November 2019). “” Les machines ne savent pas gérer les situations imprévues ““. Les Echos (in French). Retrieved 30 March 2023.
  21. ^ Chavanne, Yannick (29 March 2023). “Bengio, Musk, Wozniak et des centaines d’autres experts appellent à mettre en pause le développement des IA”. ICTjournal (in French). Retrieved 30 March 2023.
  22. ^ “Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter”. Future of Life Institute. Retrieved 30 March 2023.
  23. ^ Marcus, Gary (28 March 2023). “AI risk ≠ AGI risk”. The Road to AI We Can Trust. Retrieved 30 March 2023.
  24. ^ Marcus, G. F. (2024). Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure That AI Works for Us. MIT Press.


source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Marcus

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