Apart from the first paragraph and last section, virtually every word of this essay was taken from Gary Marcus's Christmas Day 2022 essay 'What to expect when you are expecting … GPT-4'.
Unresolvable The public record could not settle it.
Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?
The evidence is the person's or their organisation's own records.
What would count as true or false
Compare Marcus's essay of 27 July 2025 with his Substack essay of 25 December 2022, 'What to expect when you are expecting … GPT-4'. True: apart from the first paragraph and the final section, the 2025 text is essentially verbatim from the 2022 essay, with at most trivial edits. Mostly true: the bulk is copied, but there are small additional edits or insertions beyond the first paragraph and last section, or the 2022 essay's date or title differs slightly (for example, a different day). Mixed: roughly half of the middle text comes from the 2022 essay. Mostly false: only a minority of the middle text is taken from the earlier essay, or the earlier essay was not published in December 2022. False: the 2025 text is substantially new, or no such earlier essay exists.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (4)
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E1 What to Expect When You’re Expecting … GPT-4 Gary Marcus (Substack, garymarcus.substack.com) · 25 December 2022 Own record
“What Silicon Valley, and indeed the world, is waiting for, is GPT-4.”
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E2 What to Expect When You’re Expecting … GPT-4 Marcus on AI (Gary Marcus Substack) · 25 December 2022 Own record
“What to Expect When You’re Expecting … GPT-4<br>Gary Marcus<br>Dec 25, 2022<br>94<br>73<br>2”
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E3 Happy 1st Birthday, GPT-4 Marcus on AI (Gary Marcus Substack) · 16 March 2024 Own record
“As 2022 came to a close, OpenAI released an automatic writing system called ChatGPT that rapidly became an Internet sensation; less than two weeks after its release, more than a million people had signed up to try it online.”
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E4 Happy 1st Birthday, GPT-4 Marcus on AI (Gary Marcus Substack) · 16 March 2024 Own record
“Gary Marcus feels pretty good about what he wrote in this earlier essay:”
Reasoning
E1 and E2 show that Gary Marcus posted a Substack essay titled 'What to Expect When You're Expecting … GPT-4' on Dec 25, 2022. However, the evidence does not include the text of the essay of 27 July 2025. E3 and E4 come from a different 2024 post ('Happy 1st Birthday, GPT-4'). Without the 2025 text, the evidence cannot show how much of its middle section is verbatim from the 2022 essay, which is what the criteria require.
Cite this claim
Gary Marcus, “Apart from the first paragraph and last section, virtually every word of this essay was taken from Gary Marcus's Christmas Day 2022 essay 'What to expect when you are expecting … GPT-4'.” (said 27 July 2025). Verdict: unresolvable. Reliability API, claim c_19418e29ba2f, method 0.1.0+c876030c, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_19418e29ba2f
This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.
Reply to this claim
More factual claims by Gary Marcus
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Resolved true
“For years I have been warning that “scaling” — eeking out improvements in AI by adding more data and more compute, without making fundamental architectural changes — would not continue forever.”
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Mostly true
“In early August, I wrote a piece called What if Generative AI turned out to be a Dud, picked up in the Financial Times and elsewhere.”
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Resolved true
“Immediately after the February announcement of Sora, I noted Sora’s troubles with physics and predicted that they wouldn’t go away. They haven’t.”
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Mostly true
“So it was heartening to see many of the ideas that I have been pushing for a long time, including a CERN for AI and Global AI governance (which I emphasized in April in my TED talk and in The…”
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Resolved true
“It actually called for *more* research.”
Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts are made.