ClaimsPeople

Gary Marcus

Gary Marcus is an author and AI entrepreneur and professor emeritus at NYU; he has written six books, including Rebooting AI and Taming Silicon Valley, founded Geometric Intelligence (bought by Uber), testified at the May 2023 US Senate AI hearing, and writes a newsletter with over 121,000 subscribers.

712 claims collected, 213 researched, 103 resolved. Report of 4 November 2026, method 0.1.0+c876030c.

Scores by kind of claim

Each kind of claim is scored on its own, out of 100: the share that held up, with the range it likely falls in. Fewer resolved claims give a wider range.

  • Factual claims

    Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?

    79 72 85

    High confidence, 64 factual claims resolved. From 18 documents, 2019 to 2026; 19 documents sampled from 37 candidates found.

    Not scored: 32 unresolvable, 4 checkable only against their own records.

  • Predictions

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

    80 72 88

    Medium confidence, 38 predictions resolved. From 7 documents, 2019 to 2025; 19 documents sampled from 37 candidates found.

    Not scored: 60 unresolvable. 13 more fall due later.

    Does not yet allow for how likely each prediction was when made.

  • Promises

    Commitments to the person's or organisation's own future action, with something to deliver: was it delivered?

    Insufficient record: 1 promise resolved, 5 needed for a score.

    Not scored: 1 unresolvable.

All types combined: 79 (likely 74 to 84, high confidence), from 102 claims: 64 factual claims, 38 predictions. It mixes kinds of claim in different proportions for different people, so compare people kind by kind.

Gary Marcus's claims

38 claims, sorted by newest said. Choose a claim to read it in full.
VerdictKindSaidClaimTopic
Resolved true Prediction 27 Jul 2025 OpenAI will release GPT-5 imminently. Prediction · 27 Jul 2025 AI capabilities
Resolved true Prediction 27 Jul 2025 GPT-5 will still make a significant number of obvious errors that are hard to predict. Prediction · 27 Jul 2025 AI capabilities
Resolved true Prediction 27 Jul 2025 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). Prediction · 27 Jul 2025 AI safety and alignment
Mostly true Prediction 27 Jul 2025 Some of GPT-5's advice will be very bad. Prediction · 27 Jul 2025 AI capabilities
Resolved true Prediction 27 Jul 2025 GPT-5 by itself will not be a general-purpose AGI capable of arbitrary tasks. Prediction · 27 Jul 2025 AI timelines and forecasting
Mostly true Prediction 27 Jul 2025 GPT-5 will be considerably better than GPT-4. Prediction · 27 Jul 2025 AI capabilities
Resolved true Prediction 1 Jan 2025 AI Safety Institutes will offer guidance in 2025 but have little legal authority to stop truly dangerous models. Prediction · 1 Jan 2025 AI policy and governance
Resolved true Prediction 1 Jan 2025 Profits from AI models will remain modest or nonexistent in 2025. Prediction · 1 Jan 2025 Economics and markets
Resolved true Prediction 1 Jan 2025 Lack of reliability will continue to afflict generative AI in 2025. Prediction · 1 Jan 2025 AI capabilities
Resolved true Prediction 1 Jan 2025 Artificial general intelligence will not be achieved in 2025. Prediction · 1 Jan 2025 AI timelines and forecasting
Resolved true Prediction 1 Jan 2025 Hallucinations will continue to afflict generative AI in 2025. Prediction · 1 Jan 2025 AI capabilities
Resolved true Prediction 1 Jan 2025 Less than 10% of the workforce will be replaced by AI in 2025, probably less than 5%. Prediction · 1 Jan 2025 AI, the economy and work
Resolved true Prediction 1 Jan 2025 The US will continue to have very little regulation protecting consumers from generative AI risks in 2025. Prediction · 1 Jan 2025 AI policy and governance
Mostly true Prediction 1 Jan 2025 A large-scale cyberattack in which generative AI plays an important causal role may well occur in 2025. Prediction · 1 Jan 2025 Other global risks
Resolved true Prediction 1 Jan 2025 AI agents will be heavily hyped throughout 2025 but remain far from reliable, except possibly in very narrow use cases. Prediction · 1 Jan 2025 AI capabilities
Resolved true Prediction 1 Jan 2025 AI power consumption will rise in 2025 and remain a major problem, while few generative AI companies will be transparent about their usage. Prediction · 1 Jan 2025 AI compute, hardware and data
Mostly true Prediction 1 Jan 2025 Few if any radiologists will be replaced by AI in 2025. Prediction · 1 Jan 2025 AI, the economy and work
Resolved true Prediction 1 Jan 2025 No single AI system will solve more than 4 of the AI 2027 Marcus-Brundage tasks by the end of 2025. Prediction · 1 Jan 2025 AI capabilities
Resolved true Prediction 1 Jan 2025 In 2025 humanoid robotics will see a lot of hype, but nobody will release a robot remotely as capable as Rosie the Robot. Prediction · 1 Jan 2025 AI capabilities
Mostly true Prediction 1 Jan 2025 Neurosymbolic AI will become much more prominent in 2025. Prediction · 1 Jan 2025 AI capabilities
Mostly true Prediction 1 Jan 2025 OpenAI's Sora will continue to have trouble with physics in 2025. Prediction · 1 Jan 2025 AI capabilities
Mostly true Prediction 31 Mar 2024 Marcus doubted that a mindblowing GPT model would be released in 2024. Prediction · 31 Mar 2024 AI timelines and forecasting
Mostly true Prediction 31 Mar 2024 GPT-5 is likely to be even more expensive to train and operate than GPT-4. Prediction · 31 Mar 2024 Economics and markets
Mixed Prediction 26 Oct 2023 With more than 60 elections around the world in 2024, the chance that at least one would be swayed by deepfakes is high. Prediction · 26 Oct 2023 Other global risks
Mostly true Prediction 25 Dec 2022 GPT-4 will still be reckless and hard to control, making a significant number of stupid errors. Prediction · 25 Dec 2022 AI capabilities
Mostly true Prediction 25 Dec 2022 GPT-4's natural language output still won't be reliably usable as input to downstream programs such as databases or virtual assistants. Prediction · 25 Dec 2022 AI capabilities
Resolved true Prediction 25 Dec 2022 GPT-4 will definitely seem smarter than its predecessors, but its internal architecture will remain problematic. Prediction · 25 Dec 2022 AI capabilities
Mostly true Prediction 25 Dec 2022 GPT-4 will not be trustworthy and complete enough to give reliable medical advice. Prediction · 25 Dec 2022 AI capabilities
Mostly true Prediction 25 Dec 2022 GPT-4 will be a very large, powerful system (a 'monster'). Prediction · 25 Dec 2022 AI capabilities
Mostly true Prediction 25 Dec 2022 With GPT-4, fluent hallucinations will still be common and easily induced, escalating the risk of LLMs being used to create misinformation. Prediction · 25 Dec 2022 AI capabilities
Mostly true Prediction 25 Dec 2022 GPT-4 may be better at faking term papers, but if it follows the same playbook as its predecessors, it still won't really understand the world, and its flaws will eventually show. Prediction · 25 Dec 2022 AI capabilities
Mostly true Prediction 25 Dec 2022 GPT-4 will blow people's minds when released. Prediction · 25 Dec 2022 AI capabilities
Mostly true Prediction 25 Dec 2022 Marcus suspected that GPT-4's release would follow a pattern of immense buzz, then scientific scrutiny, then recognition that many problems remain. Prediction · 25 Dec 2022 AI capabilities
Mostly true Prediction 25 Dec 2022 If GPT-4 is architecturally essentially the same as GPT-3, it can be expected to be unable to construct internal models of how the world works and, in consequence, unable to understand things at an abstract level. Prediction · 25 Dec 2022 AI capabilities
Mostly true Prediction 25 Dec 2022 AI alignment between human wants and machine behavior will remain a critical unsolved problem, with GPT-4 unable to reliably follow shared human values. Prediction · 25 Dec 2022 AI safety and alignment
Mostly true Prediction 25 Dec 2022 GPT-4 will remain a pastiche generator and useful for brainstorming and first drafts, but not trustworthy general intelligence. Prediction · 25 Dec 2022 AI capabilities
Resolved false Prediction 14 Dec 2021 Gary Marcus bet that hybrid (neurosymbolic) AI models would pull ahead in 2022. Prediction · 14 Dec 2021 AI timelines and forecasting
Resolved true Prediction 20 Sep 2019 Marcus said he did not think machines would reach world-class scientific reasoning within the next five years (by 2024). Prediction · 20 Sep 2019 AI timelines and forecasting
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Gary Marcus

Open its page

Prediction AI capabilities

“It will not be trustworthy and complete enough to give reliable medical advice, despite devouring a large fraction of the Internet.”

Gary Marcus, author 25 December 2022 What to Expect When You're Expecting … GPT-4 (Marcus on AI)

GPT-4 will not be trustworthy and complete enough to give reliable medical advice.

Mostly true True in substance, wrong in a detail.

The second judge said resolved true; the verdict shown is the first judge's.

What would count as true or false

This prediction is judged on GPT-4 as released (March 2023) and evaluated during 2023. TRUE: credible evidence shows GPT-4 was not reliable enough to give medical advice without supervision. This can be peer-reviewed or independent studies documenting clinically significant errors, hallucinations or omissions in medical answers, or OpenAI's own documentation warning against relying on it for medical advice. MOSTLY TRUE: GPT-4 performed strongly on many medical tests, for example exam-style benchmarks, but notable reliability failures in real advice settings were still documented. MOSTLY FALSE: most evaluations found GPT-4's medical advice broadly reliable, with only isolated problems. FALSE: credible evaluations found GPT-4 gave consistently reliable and complete medical advice, comparable to clinicians, and it was treated as trustworthy for that purpose. Passing medical licensing exams alone does not count as reliable medical advice.

Evidence

  1. GPT-4 language model gives limited quality medical answers in study MedTech Dive · 5 July 2023
    “The GPT-4 AI gave responses that matched 15 of the 25 recommendations.”
  2. ChatGPT as a medical doctor? A diagnostic accuracy study on common and rare diseases medRxiv · 23 January 2025
    “ChatGPT 4 is more successful than ChatGPT 3.5 (Wilcoxon signed rank test, alpha=0.05, p<0.004) but still far from the performance of the common cases. 40% of all cases are solved with the first suggested diagnosis while it takes 8 or more suggestions to reach a 90% diagnostic accuracy.”
  3. ChatGPT as a medical doctor? A diagnostic accuracy study on common and rare diseases medRxiv · 23 January 2025
    “The results for ChatGPT 4 are even superior and 100% of all cases were solved in all 3 prompt versions within 3 suggested diagnoses (top3 accuracy).”
  4. GPT-4 System Card - cdn.openai.com OpenAI · 13 May 2025
    “As noted above in 2.2, despite GPT-4's capabilities, it maintains a tendency to make up facts, to double-down on incorrect information, and to perform tasks incorrectly.”

Reasoning

An independent 2023 study reported that GPT-4's answers matched only 15 of 25 guideline-based medical recommendations (E1). OpenAI's own GPT-4 system card warns that the model tends to make up facts, double down on incorrect information and perform tasks incorrectly (E4). A diagnostic accuracy study found GPT-4 did well on common cases, solving all of them within its top three suggestions (E3). On rare diseases, though, its first suggestion was right in only 40% of cases (E2). That pairs strong performance on some tests with documented reliability failures, which matches the mostly-true level of the criteria.

Cite this claim

Gary Marcus, “GPT-4 will not be trustworthy and complete enough to give reliable medical advice.” (said 25 December 2022). Verdict: mostly true. Reliability API, claim c_6baf6d86ea1a, method 0.1.0+c876030c. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_6baf6d86ea1a

Claims without a verdict

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