korrents

What Gary Marcus thinks about scaling laws

@gary-marcus · 10 positions · 0 changes of mind

Cognitive scientist, professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at NYU, and the most persistent public critic of large language models. Author of The Algebraic Mind and Rebooting AI; writes the Marcus on AI newsletter.

Gary Marcus did not write this page.

We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.

2 dated positions, 2024 to 2025, in their own words. Our reading of what Gary Marcus has said — not written or endorsed by them.

2 positions so far — this page is not yet offered to search engines.

  1. Our readingThe LLM line of research will reach a capability plateau.

    Their wordsBut this particular approach has limits that are clearer by the day.

    ↗A knockout blow for LLMs?garymarcus.substack.com 6th of 6 in this piece

    LLMs

    Interesting
  2. 8 months earlier

  3. Our readingScaling the 2019-2023 recipe — same architecture, bigger model, more data — is not enough; further progress depends on new architectural ideas.

    Their wordsNeurosymbolic AI — combining such machinery with neural networks – is likely a necessary condition for going forward.

    ↗LLMs don’t do formal reasoning - and that is a HUGE problemgarymarcus.substack.com 2nd of 2 in this piece

    Interesting