Marcus on AI

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.