Gary Marcus Used to Call AI Stupid--Now He Calls It Dangerous

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.