As we've reported, NYU Tandon is making a bid for New York City to become the capital city of artificial intelligence. One graduate of its Future Labs incubator, Geometric Intelligence, has already made a big splash in the field: last year, it was acquired by Uber, where its founder, Gary Marcus, launched the ride-hailing company's R&D lab for artificial intelligence. Based upon that accomplishment, you might think Marcus, a professor of psychology at NYU, would be one of the biggest cheerleaders for the potential of AI. Instead, he's consistently thrown cold water on the grandiose notions that are commonly disseminated in the media. IBM's Watson might have beaten Ken Jennings at Jeopardy!, but in Marcus's view, the average AI system isn't smarter than a fifth-grader: it can't make abstractions, and it can't converse naturally.