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Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

Why are we even bothering talking about this?

It's Gary Marcus "neural networks don't really work" suddenly discovering they do, and literally trying to shut down research in that area while keeping his prefered research areas funded.

We know a bunch of the people whose names are on the letter didn't sign it (eg Yann Lecunn who said he disagreed with the premise and didn't sign it).

I'm so offended by the idea of this that I'll personally fund $10k of training runs myself in a jurisdiction where it isn't banned if this ever became law in the US.

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> I'm so offended by the idea of this that I'll personally fund $10k of training runs myself in a jurisdiction where it isn't banned if this ever became law in the US.

And this is exactly the risk. These things will just go other places while the US trips over its salty billionaires trying to create political red tape to allow their own businesses to catch up.

Surely Elon has no reservations about putting premature self driving cars on the road. Or are we just going to pretend that the last decade of his business failures have nothing to do with this hypocrisy? At least GPT hasn’t killed anyone yet.

An open letter full of forged signatures and conflicts of interest aren’t convincing enough for the repercussions of the government stepping in. More than anything, this just reeks of playing on peoples fear of change.

New things are scary, but in my opinion, this kind of drastic measure starts with broad interest panels that first evaluate and detail the risks. Ooo scary doesn’t cut it.

>last decade of his business failures

What world are you living in if you think Tesla and SpaceX have been in the past 10 years business failures?

When people don't like Musk for whatever reason but usually it's political alignment, they just make up things. I see people continue to claim that Twitter is failing, even though it's been working fine every time I log into. With Tesla, they'll just ignore the thousands of happy customers and focus on the bad stories like the occasional exploding car. It's quite sad to see normally reliable technical people go off the rails on these issues.

> At least GPT hasn’t killed anyone yet.

Hard to tell, given that…

(0) newspapers apparently rename things for clicks: https://www.brusselstimes.com/belgium/430098/belgian-man-com...

(1) him being a hypocrite tells you a mistake has been made, not which of the contradictory positions is wrong.

My resolution is: GPT isn't the only AI, and Musk is pretty open about wanting to put FSD AI into those androids of his, so if the Optimus AI was as good as Musk sells it as being, it would absolutely be covered by this.

(2) how do you even compare the fatality rates here?

GPT doesn't move, and stationary Teslas aren't very dangerous, so miles-per-death seems a poor choice.

User-hours per death? Perhaps, but I don't know how many user-hours either of them have had yet.

And then (3), while I don't really trust self-promotional statistics, those are the only ones I have for Tesla, which says that switching it on increased the distance between accidents: https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

Better sources appreciated, if anyone has them! :)

(4) finally, as this isn't just about GPT but all AI: how much of the change in the USA's suicide rate since the release of Facebook can be attributed to the content recommendation AI that Facebook uses? What share of culpability do they and Twitter bare for the Myanmar genocide thanks to imperfections in the automation of abuse detection and removal? Did the search AI of Google and YouTube promote conspiracies, and if so how much blame do they get for the deaths proximally caused by anti-vaccination? And in reverse, over-zealous AI have seen fraud where it did not exist, and people have committed suicide as a result: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/23/22399721/uk-post-office-s...

Elon musk doesn't care about this for altruistic reasons or about the future of work. He cares because he owns a social network, and these models can make spam that's impossible to detect, especially given the short size of tweets.

It's naked self-interest.

To calibrate: Yudkowsky didn't sign because he feels a temporary moratorium doesn't go far enough, and he published a piece in Time [0] with a stance that a shooting war to enforce a ban on AI training would be justified, to prevent the extinction of the human race.

I'm not convinced that he's wrong.

[0] https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-no...

The US is not in any position to start a shooting war with anyone that has the ability to push this field forward and come out of it intact. AI training will continue and Yudkowsky will be proven wrong.

what a weird modern version of religious war

Is my assumption correct that Yudkowsky is unmarried with no kids? If so, I wonder how this shapes his pessimism on the subject. Perhaps it's more exciting to be an alarmist about the future when you've only got a few decades left on this planet and with no legacy in place to leave behind.

Quite the opposite. FTA:

> When the insider conversation is about the grief of seeing your daughter lose her first tooth, and thinking she's not going to get a chance to grow up, I believe we are past the point of playing political chess about a six-month moratorium.

> It's Gary Marcus "neural networks don't really work" suddenly discovering they do, and literally trying to shut down research in that area while keeping his prefered research areas funded

Gary Marcus has been aware that neural nets work for a while now, but he is only in the spotlight for his contrarian take, if he stops having a contrarian take he disappears, because it's not like he is producing any research worth of discussion otherwise. So you can expect him to stay contrarian forever. What might have been a genuine take initially is now his job, that's how he makes money, and it's so associated with him that it's probably his identity as well.

This is a depressing pattern that I've seen get repeated over and over: it's easy to become Twitter-famous by just shitting out a steady stream of contrarian "me against the world, I'm the rogue dissident nobody wants to talk about!" takes, and once you start doing this, you have no choice but to keep it up forever (even when the takes are just wrong) because it has become your identity. It has destroyed so many interesting and intelligent people, and by itself is reason enough to never use Twitter.

Adopting a contrarian brand because it brings you attention when you'd otherwise be a nobody is by far not limited to twitter. It's a mainstay of traditional journalism.

If anything twitter disincentivizes the practice because it has commoditized cynicism: It's harder to build a brand by being the well known naysayer of X when someone can source whatever negative view they want by simply typing it into a search box.

Commoditization will be complete once the media starts quoting GPT4 for reliably opposing views.

"Neural networks don't really work" isn't an accurate representation of Marcus' position, and his actual position hasn't been shown to be wrong unless you believe that LLMs and diffusion models display, or are manifestly on the way towards displaying, understanding. That is something many think, and it's not in itself an unreasonable view. However there are also plenty of reasons to think otherwise and many, including me, who haven't conceded the point. It hasn't been settled beyond reasonable debate.

To assume that the person you disagree with can only hold their view out of cynical self-interest, wishful thinking or plain insanity is to assume that you are so obviously right that there can be no valid debate. That is a bad starting position and I'd recommend against it as a matter of principle. Apart from anything else, however convinced you are of your own rightness it's plain rude to assume everyone else is equally convinced, and ad-hominem to ascribe negative motives to those who disagree.

As for Gary Marcus, as far as I've seen he's been consistent in his views and respectful in the way he's argued them. To read about him on HN you'd think he's spent the last few years badmouthing every AI researcher around, but I haven't seen that, just disagreement with people's statements - i.e. healthy debate. I haven't followed him closely though, so if you know of any cases where he's gone beyond that and said the sorts of things about AI researchers that people routinely say about him I'd interested to see them.

This is my view too. The perceived value of LLMs relative to everything that came before is staggering.

I wouldn’t expect any regulation or laws to slow it down at this point. You might get the U.S. to crack down on it and stop innovation, GPL or proprietary license holders might win a lawsuit, etc.

But I suspect the net effect would be to push research and innovation out of the jurisdiction that made that decision and into another that isn’t willing to kill LLMs in their economy.

Personally, after seeing what LLMs can do first hand, I’d likely move jurisdictions if the U.S. cracked down on AI progress. There is a not-0 chance that putting bread on my table in 10 years requires it.

> I’d likely move jurisdictions if the U.S. cracked down on AI progress

This is my overriding concern. This is a wave crest that if you don't ride it, it may well crush you or take the ocean with it and leave you in a desert. It is as interesting as fire as a tool for civilization going forward.

What a great metaphor.

Did you recall that your planet is currently in a sixth extinction event, brought about, yes, through the repeated overuse of fire?

Zeus was right. Prometheus belonged on that rock.

A great many would likely join you, making this entire fiasco a time-wasting distraction, at best, and grave risk at worst. The technologies will continue to be developed, moratorium or not. A moratorium only enables the hidden to get there first.

The risks need to be discussed and understood, along with the benefits, and publicly. That's the only sensible way forward. Denying that the technology is here already and pretending it can be "paused" doesn't assist in alleviating their concerns.

It's absurd to think any of it can be put back inside the box it came out of. Now that it is here, how best to mitigate any bad sides it may have? Simple, continue to develop it - as it will be the only viable source of effective counter-measures.

Of course they would. It's just ridiculous.

If people are genuinely concerned about lack of access to the OpenAI models then work at training open ones!

OpenAI has a maybe 6 month lead and that's nothing. Plus it's much easier being the follower when you know what is possible.

(To be clear, I know at least a few of the projects already working on this. I just want to make it clear that is the intellectually honest approach).

I think their lead might be a bit bigger than that. ChatGPT 3.5 was released 4 months ago and I still haven't seen another LLM come close to it.

Alpaca on 13B Llama is enough to convince me that it on 65B Llama would match GPT 3.5 for most tasks.

Perplexity AI's app is definitely better than GPT 3.5 for many things although it isn't clear how they are doing everything there.

A slightly more paranoid me asks whether there’s some magic they’re using that no one is completely aware of. Watching Google fumble around makes me more paranoid that that’s the case.

Have you tried Anthropic LLC's "Claude"? Between it and ChatGPT I'm hard pressed to say which is better, though I'm tempted to give the edge to Claude.

There is already public discussion - even here - about benefits and risks, and I hope also some understanding. Otherwise the general public doesn't have a good understanding of too many issues anyway, so... what else would you suggest can be done for this particular matter? When the discussion is over and everything understood? Can such a moment actually exist? I think now is just as good as last/next year.

I hope that we'll eventually reach a point where a good public discussion about the risks/benefits can be had. Right now, though, it's simply impossible. The fog of hype actively prevents it.

> A moratorium only enables the hidden to get there first.

That's simply not true. Nobody would have gotten where GPT is today without transformers. That's not a trivial bit of insight anybody could have had. Stopping research funding and publications will prevent rapid evolution.

I mean given the current state. The technology is already sufficiently advanced and in so many peoples hands that "stopping" it now is just an exercise in pushing it underground. Only the opposite can be a useful safeguard.

Rapid evolution is well underway. Lone individuals are able to push the envelope of what's possible even with just a new basic interop, maybe in an afternoon. It's much too late to be discussing things like moratoriums.

Maybe such things could prevent emergence when the basics don't exist yet, but not when we're all already walking around holding a capable factory in our hands and can create a new product line in a few lines of Python.

It's almost impossible to tell.

Yes, plenty of low hanging fruit around; Heck, I can probably literally ask chatGPT to implement for me a few ideas I've got.

OTOH, I've known since secondary school of two distinct ways to make a chemical weapon using only things commonly found in normal kitchens, and absolutely none of the post 9/11 aftershock attacks that got in the news over the next decade did anything remotely so simple, so that example makes me confident that even bad rules passed in haste — as many of them were and remain — can actually help.

(And that's despite my GCSE Chemistry being only grade B).

Right, it's amazing to me the extent to which people are throwing their hands in there and saying "There's absolutely NOTHING that can be done!!! We must accept the AGIs however they will manifest"...

Clearly, it's a very hard problem with massive uncertainties. But we can take actions that will significantly decrease the risk of utter catastrophe.

I don't even think world-ending catastrophe is that likely. But it seems a real enough possibility that we should take it seriously.

I suspect that the people who are saying "nothing can be done" are people who want nothing to be done.

You're not financially incentivized, in most instances, to make chemical bombs with undersink materials.

Assuming the training is based on public data, then making it illegal is like a "thought crime" where the state is trying to prohibit carrying out certain computations. Well if I believe the government has no right to control my thoughts, then I believe it has no right to control whatever computation I do on my private computer as well.

Down with these ** control freaks, so much of everything nowadays prioritizes safety over freedom. This time let's put freedom first.

I disagree with this take completely.

I would kind of agree but there's zero way for this line of thought to make it into the beltway.

i have a libertarian bent but there are definitely some computations of questionable nature that probably shouldn't be lega, e.g. designing a super virus to wipe out humanity, or a super computer virus to encrypt all memory on planet earth.

where to draw the line i have no idea

Do you care about governments regulating 'carrying out certain lab operations'? And that they have no right to regulate whatever viruses or micro-organisms you develop at home? A lot of the hand-wringing isn't about whatever you're fiddling with on your computer at home, it's about the impact on society and public infrastructure and institutions we rely on. It's not hard to imagine public forums like hackernews and reddit being swamped with chatgpt spam (google searches are already dominated by SEO spam and that's probably going to get much worse). Things like our court systems rely on lawsuits mostly being expensive to file, and mostly done in good faith, and still get overwhelmed under fairly normal circumstances.

As a hypothetical, if some computations are extremely dangerous for the general public, it should be possible to ban them.

Extremely dangerous computations

On Twitter, it was "multi-blillionaires [Elon Musk] want to keep us down!" In the HN open letter thread it was "All the companies falling behind want a chance to catch up." Now it's "Gary Marcus".

The letter was signed by a lot of people, including many AI researchers, including people working on LLMs. Any dismissal that reduces to [one incumbent interest] opposes this" is missing the mark.

A lot of people, incumbents and non-incumbents, relevant experts and non-experts, are saying we need to figure out AI safety. Some have been saying it for years, other just recently, but if you want to dismiss their views, you're going to need to address their arguments, not just ad hominem dismissals.

Elon Musk is the most ironic signatory of this blog post, considering his decade-long effort to put AI behind the wheel of 100mph+ vehicles. And then he's got the gall to lecture the rest of us on "AI safety" after we finally get a semi-intelligent chatbot? Come on, man.

Given that FSD is obviously a scam, wouldn't a pause like this be in his best interest? (buys them more time, while keeping the hype machine going)

I don't know, a Tesla got me door to burrito store (6 miles) in the pelting rain the other day without human input. Seems like that's not quite the bar for an outright scam.

If we are being fair, even though we might refer to self driving capabilities as "ai" and as self aware supercomputer overlord as "ai" they aren't the same thing and you can hold different opinions on the development of them.

I don't particularly care about crowds on Twitter or HN. Musk has lots of money but can't stop me spending mine.

Marcus said:

> We must demand transparency, and if we don’t get it, we must contemplate shutting these projects down.

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-sparks-of-agi-or-the-e...

(While at the same time still saying "it's nothing to do with AGI")

Sure, sure, Marcus says one thing and has one set of motives. Elon Musk says another thing and has another set of motives. But if you want to dismiss this by questioning the motives of the signers, you've got a few thousand other people whose motives you have to identify and dismiss.

It would be much more effective, and meaningful, to challenge their arguments.

I think the Scott Aaroson link posted did a pretty good job of that.

I don't think their arguments deserve anything more than that.

There are actually no relevant experts in the field of artificial general intelligence, or the safety thereof. No one has defined a clear path to build such a thing. Claiming to be an expert in this field is like claiming to be an expert in warp drives or time machines. Those calling for a halt in research are merely ignorant, or attention seeking grifters. Their statements can be dismissed out of hand regardless of their personal wealth or academic credentials.

Current LLMs are merely sophisticated statistical tools. There is zero evidence that they could ever be developed into something that could take intentional action on it's own, or somehow physically threaten humans.

LLMs are useful for improving human productivity, and we're going to see some ugly results when criminals and psychopaths use those tools for their own ends. But this is no different from any other tool like the printing press. It is not a valid reason to restrict research.

> Current LLMs are merely sophisticated statistical tools.

This is wrong. They are have the capability for in-context learning, which doesn't match most definitions of "statistical tools"

> Current LLMs are merely sophisticated statistical tools.

Yawn. At a minimum they are tools of which we do not understand how exactly they work internally.

This is a bit like saying that 1939 Einstein wasn't an expert in nuclear bombs. Sure, it didn't exist, so he wasn't an expert on them, but he was an expert on the thing that led to it and when we said it was possible, sensible people listened.

A lot of people working on LLMs say that they believe there is a path to AGI. I'm very skeptical of claims that there's zero evidence in support of their views. I know some of these people and while they might be wrong, they're not stupid, grifters, malicious, or otherwise off-their-rockers.

What would you consider to be evidence that these (or some other technology) could be a path to be a serious physical threat? It's only meaningful for there to be "zero evidence" if there's something that could work as evidence. What is it?

That is not a valid analogy. In 1939 there was at least a clear theory of nuclear reactions backed up by extensive experiments. At that point building a weapon was mostly a hard engineering problem. But we have no comprehensive theory of cognition, or even anything that legitimately meets the criteria to be labeled a hypothesis. There is zero evidence to indicate that LLMs are on a path to AGI.

If the people working in this field have some actual hard data then I'll be happy to take a look at it. But if all they have is an opinion then let's go with mine instead.

If you want me to take this issue seriously then show me an AGI roughly on the level of a mouse or whatever. And by AGI I mean something that can reach goals by solving complex, poorly defined problems within limited resource constraints (including time). By that measure we're not even at the insect level.

> something that can reach goals by solving complex, poorly defined problems within limited resource constraints (including time).

DNN RL agents can do that. Of course you'll wave it away as "not general" or "mouse is obviously better". But you won't be able to define that precisely, just the same you're not able to prove ChatGPT "doesn't really reason".

PS. Oh nevermind, I've read your other comments below.

There are researches working on the specific problem of AI safety, and I consider them to be the experts of this field, regardless of the fact that probably no university is currently offering a master's degree specifically on AI safety. Whether one or more of these researchers are in favor of the ban, I don't know.

The safety people aren't that bright. They are just trying to write tons of requirements that the actual ML model writers follow to make sure race and violence is accounted for somehow. These are not AI experts. They are mostly lay people.

Yeah, there aren’t experts in something that doesn’t exist. That means we have to make an educated guess. By far the most rational course of action is to halt AI research. And then you say there’s no proof that we are on the path to AGI or that it would harm us. Yeah, and there never could be any proof for either side of the argument. So your dismissal of AI is kind of flaccid without any proof or rational speculation or reasoning. Listen man I’m not a cynical commenter. I believe what I’m saying and I think it’s important. If you really think you’re right then get on the phone with me or video chat so we can actually debate and settle this.

You clearly have not read anything regarding the capabilities of GPT-4 and also clearly have not played around with ChatGPT at all. GPT-4 has already displayed a multitude of emergent capabilities.

This is incredibly ignorant and I expect better from this forum.

Bullshit. I have used the various LLM tools and have read extensively about them. They have not displayed any emergent capabilities in an AGI sense. Your comment is simply ignorant.

I'm going to just assume you're not being malicious.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/sparks-...

https://www.assemblyai.com/blog/emergent-abilities-of-large-...

If you'd like you can define "emergent capabilities in an AGI sense".

I am not being malicious. I do not accept those papers as being actual examples of emergent behavior in a true AGI sense. This is just another case of humans imagining that they see patterns in noise. In other words, they haven't rejected the null hypothesis. Junk science. (And just because the science is bad doesn't mean the underlying products aren't useful for solving practical problems and enhancing human productivity.)

The blowhards who are calling for arbitrary restrictions on research are the ones being malicious.

OK you're moving the goalposts and just flat-out saying that you know better than the actual researchers in the field. That's fine, and it's what I was assuming you were going to say, but I appreciate you being open about it.

I'd also guess the correct take to see LLMs as human magnifiers more than human replacers* -- most technology does this, magnifying aspects of the human condition rather than fundamentally change it..

But that doesn't make me sanguine about them. The printing press was amazing and it required new social conceptions (copyright). Nuclear weapons did "little" other than amplify human destructive capability but required a whole lot of thought on how to deal with it, some of it very strange like MAD and the logic of building doomsday devices. We're in the middle of dealing with other problems we barely understand from the extension of communications technology that may already have gotten out of hand.

We seem like we're limited in our habits of social reflection. We seem to prefer the idea that we can so we must, and if we don't someone else will in an overarching fundamentally competitive contest. It deprives us of the ability to cooperate thoughtfully in thinking about the ends. Invention without responsibility will have suboptimal and possibly horrifying outcomes.

(* I am much less certain that there isn't some combination system or future development that could result in an autonomous self-directed AGI. LLMs alone probably not, but put an LLM in an embodied system with its own goals and sensory capacities and who knows)

> We seem to prefer the idea that we can so we must, and if we don't someone else will in an overarching fundamentally competitive contest.

Yes. This line of argument terrifies me not only because it's fatalist, but because the logical result of it is that it results in the worst possible outcomes.

It smells a lot like "we need to destroy society because if we don't do it, someone else will." Before anyone jumps on me about this, I'm not saying LLMs will destroy society, but this argument is almost always put in response to people who are arguing that they will destroy society.

<< A lot of people, incumbents and non-incumbents, relevant experts and non-experts, are saying we need to figure out AI safety. Some have been saying it for years, other just recently, but if you want to dismiss their views, you're going to need to address their arguments, not just ad hominem dismissals.

Some of us look at patterns and are, understandably, cynical given some of the steps taken ( including those that effectively made OpenAI private the moment its potential payoff became somewhat evident ).

So yeah. There is money on the table and some real stakes that could be lost by the handful of recent owners. Those incumbent and non-incumbent voices are only being amplified now ( as you noted they DID exist before all this ), because it is convenient for the narrative.

They are not being dismissed. They are simply being used.

I can maybe sense some foresight that we didn't have at the time other world-changing technologies were discovered. People reference the printing press often in relation to the arguments against progress, but I haven't seen discussion about the internal combustion engine yet, which hundreds of years later we're now hoping we can replace with EVs because of their unforseen consequences. Books don't have the same impact, especially with paperless formats becoming commonplace. Would we have reacted to the ICE hundreds of years ago the same way some are reacting to AI, that it needs to be stopped or limited to prevent the destruction of $entity, if there had been enough knowledge about how tech can affect e.g. the environment, or the world in general?

There was nothing in place to stop us from taking the tradeoff of transportation efficiency over the at the time unknown negative effects. But should we call the invention of the ICE and other related technologies a mistake that irreparably doomed the planet and our future generations? I have no idea. It's a tough question we were incapable of asking at the time, and might reveal some hard truths about the nature of progress and the price we have to pay for it. At least with the effects known at this point, we can start asking it, and it's a step up from obliviousness.

All the big named signatories to this were transparently self interested, as well as not real "practitioners" - mostly adjacent folks upset to be out of the limelight. I know it's a blurry line, but people like Andrew Ng and Yann LeCunn who are actually building ML stuff have dismissed this outright. It's almost like a bunch of sore losers got together and took an irrelevant stand. Like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell vs Spotify.

Yoshua Bengio is a signatory and shares a Turing award with Yann LeCun though...

I knew that when I wrote my comment

I mean then what is the basis for calling him not a "real practitioner" while Yann LeCun is? It seems a little unfair to dismiss outright the opinion on a deep learning technology from a guy who won a Turing award for research into deep learning. I also don't see any evidence that he is "transparently self-interested."

> We know a bunch of the people whose names are on the letter didn't sign it

Yann LeCun's name never was on the letter. Where did this meme come from.

Pierre Levy tweeted that Yann LeCun signed the letter and this was one of the earlier tweets that gained traction.

The tweet where Yann denies that he signed the letter: https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1640910484030255109. You can see a screenshot in the replies of the originally deleted tweet.

What if governments start regulating and locking down advanced computing in the same way they locked down medicine and advanced weapontry?

So far it seems letting private industry iterate on LLMs doesn't directly pose to a risk of ending lives like human trials and nuclear weaponry development do.

I think the fear of LLMs is very overblown. On the other hand, I think that if LLMs actually manage to do what proponents hope it will, some people will die as a result due to economics when they lose their jobs.

That's not unique to LLMs, of course. It's what has happened before every time something has obsoleted a bunch of jobs. There's no reason to think this time would be any different.

The old excuse from AI researchers was that once AI takes all the mundane jobs, people will be free to become artists. Ask artists now what they think about AI. A whole lot of them aren't very happy about it.

Well they do of course. There are export restrictions on supercomputers now, including many NVIDIA GPUs.

I contend that doesn't matter.

There is sufficient compute available now at consumer levels to make it too late to stop training LLMs.

If cloud A100s became unavailable tomorrow it'd be awkward, but there is enough progress being made on training on lower RAM cards to show it is possible.

> I contend that doesn't matter.

Slowing things down is a real effect that will impact how circumstances unfold.

Do I trust that a "slow down / pause" would be done robustly and sensibly? I wish I was more optimistic about that.

At the very least, we should definitely continue having this conversation.

They do, which is why China is dumping a bunch of money into ramping up its asic/GPU tech and production.

Talking about whether AI “works” or “doesn’t work” is a dumb debate. The conversation about AI is confusing with people having a lot of different ideas that are mostly more nuanced than that. I don’t believe Gary Marcus thinks in those terms either.

How can it be realistically shut down? There is too much cat-out-of-bag and many countries in the world won’t give a crap about whatever the west wants. So the west continues or falls behind. What is the discussion even here?

> It's Gary Marcus "neural networks don't really work" suddenly discovering they do,

I'm not familiar with Gary Marcus's arguments, but perhaps there's a bit of an misinterpretation or mind-reading going on with this specific point? Not sure, but one of the first comments on the article said the following as a possible explanation.

> Gary Marcus has tried to explain this. Current AI bots are dangerous precisely because they combine LLM abilities with LLM unreliability and other LLM weaknesses.

Why exactly are you offended?

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