Gary Marcus

Prediction · AI capabilities

“It will remain turbocharged pastiche generator, and a fine tool for brainstorming, and for first drafts, but not trustworthy general intelligence.”

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

GPT-4 will remain a pastiche generator and useful for brainstorming and first drafts, but not trustworthy general intelligence.

Mostly true True in substance, wrong in a detail.

What would count as true or false

Judge GPT-4 as released by OpenAI (March 2023) and as assessed during its first year or so of use. The claim's testable parts are: (a) GPT-4 is useful for brainstorming and first drafts; (b) it is not trustworthy general intelligence, meaning it still makes notable errors, hallucinations or reasoning failures that make it unreliable without human checking, and it is not broadly regarded as AGI. 'Pastiche generator' is a characterisation; judge it only as consistent with GPT-4 producing text by recombining patterns from its training data. TRUE: both (a) and (b) hold according to independent evaluations, OpenAI's own GPT-4 technical report or system card, and widespread reporting. MOSTLY TRUE: (b) holds, but the 'pastiche' characterisation is notably disputed, for example by credible evidence of novel generalisation, while it is still not trustworthy general intelligence. MIXED: GPT-4 is unreliable in some major uses but credibly regarded as trustworthy and general in others. MOSTLY FALSE: there is wide expert agreement that GPT-4 is general intelligence, with only minor reliability caveats. FALSE: there is broad consensus that GPT-4 is trustworthy general intelligence.

Evidence

1. GPT-4 | OpenAI OpenAI · 14 March 2023

   “Despite its capabilities, GPT‑4 has similar limitations as earlier GPT models. Most importantly, it still is not fully reliable (it “hallucinates” facts and makes reasoning errors).”

2. GPT-4 Can’t Reason (Position Paper) arXiv (ar5iv mirror) · 26 June 2023

   “Based on the results of that analysis, this paper argues that, despite the occasional flashes of analytical brilliance, GPT-4 at present is utterly incapable of reasoning.”

3. Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4 arXiv (ar5iv mirror)

   “These examples suggest that GPT-4 has not only learned some general principles and patterns of different domains and styles but can also synthesize them in creative and novel ways.”

4. Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4 arXiv (ar5iv mirror)

   “Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4’s capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system.”

Reasoning

OpenAI's GPT-4 launch announcement says the model "is not fully reliable" and still hallucinates facts and makes reasoning errors (E1). A position paper argues that GPT-4 is "utterly incapable of reasoning" (E2). Together these support part (b): GPT-4 is not trustworthy general intelligence. The Microsoft 'Sparks' paper argues GPT-4 could reasonably be viewed as an "early (yet still incomplete)" AGI (E4), which is one research group's view and not evidence of broad consensus that it is AGI. But the same paper says its examples suggest GPT-4 can synthesize learned patterns "in creative and novel ways" (E3), which disputes the 'pastiche' description. No item directly shows part (a), that GPT-4 is useful for brainstorming and first drafts.

Cite this claim

Gary Marcus, “GPT-4 will remain a pastiche generator and useful for brainstorming and first drafts, but not trustworthy general intelligence.” (said 25 December 2022). Verdict: mostly true. Reliability API, claim c_f7e1127f94c5, method 0.1.0+c876030c. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_f7e1127f94c5