Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus) header
Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus) profile picture

OG GenAI Skeptic; spoke at US Senate. Warned about hallucinations in 2001. Advocating world models & neurosymbolic AI ever since. Author, Marcus on AI & 6 books

Joined December 2010
Photo by Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus)Photo by Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus)Photo by Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus)Photo by Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus)Photo by Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus)Photo by Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus)Photo by Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus)Photo by Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus)Photo by Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus)Photo by Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus)
Three thoughts on what really matters: 1. Fuck cancer 2. Friends are irreplaceable 3. The new "Marcus test" for AI is when AI makes a significant dent on cancer May that happen sooner, much sooner, rather than later. In memory of my childhood friend Paul.
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what i have been saying for years maybe now people will listen?
Brute force computation is not enough for intelligence. Clever new methods are needed. The science of AI is far from finished. IMHO
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Gary Marcus retweeted
So since everyone is paying attention now, here is the latest version
One month later: "Circular revenues received a lot of the airtime, but the circular impact of AI on markets and tech probably didn’t get enough scrutiny while things were going well. That’s changed." - JPM's Global Co-Head of Cash Trading Ron Adler
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Breaking: Green line represents a widespread fantasy, and roughly the rocket that Anthropic would have needed to make it as a sustainable business. The dark bars on the right show that they already fell off the pace — which is why they probably won’t make it.
Anthropic’s October ARR topped $80B, per WSJ, consistent with TickerTrends tracking We tracked $82.33B as of Oct. 30, up 7.2% from our Sept. 24 weekly release
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Will be interesting to see how Jensen winds up being viewed in history.
Replying to @GaryMarcus
there is the whole circular financing thing that NVIDIA's the tentpole of. So when he wasn't banging a Chinese honeypot, he was inflating the biggest bubble in history that may well torpedo the US economy if it bursts abruptly. Other than those two things, he's v. prudent! 🤦‍♂️
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easy: at that point many of them fail
Local AI models, which are run on a laptop or smartphone, are becoming increasingly capable. Future phones will be able to perform most of the inference that data centers currently do. What will happen to the trillions of dollars spent on data centers then?
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It’s all downhill from here!
Replying to @GaryMarcus
front row next to the Pope is a tough act to follow
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maybe they won’t?
How does Anthropic raise $80-100bn two weeks after OpenAI could only raise $11bn of a $30bn target?
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💯
Replying to @GaryMarcus
Seeing the hype collapse is a reminder markets love narratives, not fundamentals
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Figures that a man who trusted Sam Altman would fall for a Chinese spy.
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Only 1 in 3 people in this unscientific poll still think Anthropic can get the IPO done at > $1T. A month ago many people were imagining $2T.
anthropic
35%will still IPO at >= $1T
25%will IPO at < $1T
41%postpone indefinitely
782 votes • Final results
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Gary Marcus retweeted
Anthropic Ammended S-1 “We expect our costs will increase over time and our losses will continue” “We do not expect our revenue will continue to grow at comparable rates” This company has $110 billion in annual commitments that they admit they need to pay, but will need to grow into. The company and business is nothing more than speculation.
OpenAI and Anthropic are absolutely going bankrupt if they don’t get out of these commitments. Getting out needs to be the priority before IPO. Anthropic itself admits in S1 the company will suffer potentially heavy losses speculating on early compute deals coming online faster than the company can utilize it in its growth. Important posts to read. One of those two or $NVDA itself likely involved here with $ORCL Wasteful spending.
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Could Jensen’s judgement in this have been any worse?
The story keeps getting crazier. To recap everything that has been reported so far: - The US intelligence community discovered that Jensen Huang, the CEO of the largest company in the world, was sleeping with Alice Huang, a Chinese spy and an executive at Megaspeed. (FT) - Multiple independent investigations have concluded that Megaspeed is likely a Chinese cutout, which helps Chinese companies access AI chips or circumvent export controls. (NYT and Bloomberg) - The US intelligence community also concluded that Alice Huang’s goal was to convince Jensen to lobby the U.S. government to loosen export controls on advanced AI chips. (NYT) - The intelligence community relayed this information to “a small group of top US government officials” earlier this year. (FT) - Over the last year, Jensen Huang has repeatedly lobbied the U.S. government to loosen export controls on advanced chips. @BISgov has done so, not only by permitting the export of H200 chips to China, but also not enforcing export controls that would have required a license for exports of the most advanced Blackwell chips to Megaspeed and Southeast Asia. - Although @CommerceGov leadership was presumably briefed on this information by the U.S. intelligence community, @BISgov has taken no actions to tighten controls on Megaspeed or Southeast Asia. - Megaspeed remains a preferred cloud partner of Nvidia, and continues to receive Nvidia Blackwell chips despite employing a Chinese spy who reportedly is romantically engaged with the CEO of Nvidia. - Tens of billions of dollars worth of AI chips have been exported to Southeast Asia this year alone, and Malaysia and Singapore are now two of the four largest importers of AI chips in the world. What is going on here??? We need answers. The question of who gets the most advanced AI chips in the world is literally the defining strategic question of our time. And not only does it seem like the MSS may be directly influencing the debate on export controls in the United States, but also @CommerceGov is refusing to listen to the warnings of the IC on this issue. What is a POSSIBLE good explanation for why Megaspeed is still receiving chips? Why is there not a license requirement for AI chip shipments to all of Southeast Asia? This is beyond strange at this point. The fallout from this story will be massive. Obviously, the motivations underpinning Nvidia’s policy views opposing export controls must now all be questioned. But also, how did @BISgov sit on this information and has still taken no actions? We need answers.
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Gary Marcus retweeted
Worthwhile to note that there are very important metrics that aren't accelerating.
Anthropic revenue update, growth definitely slowed further over the last three months. They added $16B, or ~25% growth, which would naively compound to 2.4x over a year. There's a little bit of signal from the Q3 revenue total that is not encoded here where Ant probably grew slower in August+September and reaccelerated a bit in October.
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Gary Marcus retweeted
The story keeps getting crazier. To recap everything that has been reported so far: - The US intelligence community discovered that Jensen Huang, the CEO of the largest company in the world, was sleeping with Alice Huang, a Chinese spy and an executive at Megaspeed. (FT) - Multiple independent investigations have concluded that Megaspeed is likely a Chinese cutout, which helps Chinese companies access AI chips or circumvent export controls. (NYT and Bloomberg) - The US intelligence community also concluded that Alice Huang’s goal was to convince Jensen to lobby the U.S. government to loosen export controls on advanced AI chips. (NYT) - The intelligence community relayed this information to “a small group of top US government officials” earlier this year. (FT) - Over the last year, Jensen Huang has repeatedly lobbied the U.S. government to loosen export controls on advanced chips. @BISgov has done so, not only by permitting the export of H200 chips to China, but also not enforcing export controls that would have required a license for exports of the most advanced Blackwell chips to Megaspeed and Southeast Asia. - Although @CommerceGov leadership was presumably briefed on this information by the U.S. intelligence community, @BISgov has taken no actions to tighten controls on Megaspeed or Southeast Asia. - Megaspeed remains a preferred cloud partner of Nvidia, and continues to receive Nvidia Blackwell chips despite employing a Chinese spy who reportedly is romantically engaged with the CEO of Nvidia. - Tens of billions of dollars worth of AI chips have been exported to Southeast Asia this year alone, and Malaysia and Singapore are now two of the four largest importers of AI chips in the world. What is going on here??? We need answers. The question of who gets the most advanced AI chips in the world is literally the defining strategic question of our time. And not only does it seem like the MSS may be directly influencing the debate on export controls in the United States, but also @CommerceGov is refusing to listen to the warnings of the IC on this issue. What is a POSSIBLE good explanation for why Megaspeed is still receiving chips? Why is there not a license requirement for AI chip shipments to all of Southeast Asia? This is beyond strange at this point. The fallout from this story will be massive. Obviously, the motivations underpinning Nvidia’s policy views opposing export controls must now all be questioned. But also, how did @BISgov sit on this information and has still taken no actions? We need answers.
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Gary Marcus retweeted
TechCrunch: "A new report from Ramp shows AI spending flatlined over late summer even as token volumes rose, a sign that price competition and savvier customers may be capping revenue for OpenAI and Anthropic. Token spend only grew 1.5% across August and September. To compare, in July, it grew 42% from the previous month. “Almost the entire spend on AI is from venture-backed, high-growth tech companies...That’s fine as long as AI spend continues to rise, but...the top 1% of firms have stuttered slightly in their spend in August and September, coming up just below the $10,000 per-employee they were hitting at their summer peaks. A slowdown among that cohort is 'sufficient to slow down revenue entirely, despite the fact that we’re seeing rising volumes." As I recommended to my clients back in September in my report on "The AI Trade" (sageroadresearch.com/product…): "Market participants still underestimate the significance of the “tokenmaxxing” era ending. The more enterprises experiment with AI, the more they’re confronting a less-than-viable cost/benefit equation for many operations previously assumed to be ripe for AI disruption... Significantly reduce exposure to the AI trade, especially the picks and shovels...Even as we turned more bearish on the AI trade, we never questioned that profligate CAPEX would continue. This is why we’ve advocated that exposure to picks-and-shovels providers should be maintained. We no longer believe that today. There’s always been an element of suspension of disbelief in the triple-digit percentage stock gains made by everyone from Nvidia to Broadcom to TSMC, Micron, AMD, and GE Vernova—as if the AI revolution had rendered cyclicality a challenge of the past. Now, AI spending’s rate of change is poised to slow. Politics is likely to increase fear that the pace of the AI data center buildout falls short of expectations. And the threat grows that one or more hyperscalers decides to pull back from the AI arms race. Given how high some picks-and-shovels stocks have climbed, blockbuster beats will be increasingly required to outperform. We don’t expect that moving forward." Can you afford to get the big picture wrong? Reach out if you're interested in learning more about a Sage Road subscription.
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(FT) - The US government believes Nvidia’s chief executive Jensen Huang had a romantic relationship with a Chinese woman who was recruited to spy for China’s main intelligence agency, according to people familiar with the matter. @FT $NVDA ft.com/content/a55a2a22-4479…
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Confirmed: Chinese intelligence recruited a spy to target Jensen Huang to "potentially influence the company to push for its most advanced chips to be made available to China"
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