ClaimsGary Marcus

“What we have now is an approximation to intelligence, not the real thing, and as such it will never really be trustworthy.”

Gary Marcus, quoted in CNBC and reposted by him 29 December 2021 Post by @GaryMarcus on X, 2021-12-29 (X)

Prediction AI safety and alignment

Current AI, being an approximation to intelligence rather than the real thing, will never really be trustworthy.

Unresolvable The public record could not settle it.

Prediction: Statements about events outside the person's control, checked once they fell due: did they come true?

Reasoning

A 'never' prediction with no horizon and vague 'trustworthy' that cannot be settled.

Cite this claim

Gary Marcus, “Current AI, being an approximation to intelligence rather than the real thing, will never really be trustworthy.” (said 29 December 2021). Verdict: unresolvable. Reliability API, claim c_f202f154eadf, method 0.1.0+c876030c, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_f202f154eadf

This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.

Reply to this claim

For Gary Marcus, or someone speaking for them: a correction or counter-evidence. Replies are read before anything is shown; an approved reply shows your name, role, date, statement and link. Your email address is never shown and is deleted 30 days after the decision (privacy).

More prediction claims by Gary Marcus

  1. Resolved true Prediction 27 July 2025
    “Guardrails (a la ChatGPT) may be in place, but the guardrails will teeter between being too weak (beaten by “jailbreaks”) and too strong (rejecting some perfectly reasonable requests).”

    If the model being discussed has guardrails like ChatGPT's, they will teeter between being too weak (beaten by jailbreaks) and too strong (rejecting some perfectly reasonable requests).

  2. Mostly true Prediction 25 December 2022
    ““Alignment” between what humans want and what machines do will continue to be a critical, unsolved problem.”

    AI alignment between human wants and machine behavior will remain a critical unsolved problem, with GPT-4 unable to reliably follow shared human values.

  3. Mostly true Prediction 27 July 2025
    “Some of its advice will be head-scratchingly bad.”

    Some of GPT-5's advice will be very bad.

  4. Mostly true Prediction 27 July 2025
    “GPT-5 will surely be better, a lot better than GPT-4.”

    GPT-5 will be considerably better than GPT-4.

  5. Resolved true Prediction 27 July 2025
    “GPT-5 really is about to drop, no foolin’.”

    OpenAI will release GPT-5 imminently.

All of them

Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts are made.