In the artificial intelligence world, there are two streams. One is the cool, analytical current of AI scholarship, flowing with genuine curiosity and drive to verify. The other is the boiling-hot torrent of commercial AI — excited, frenetic, gushing with utopian promises.
As AI hype blasts off into the heavens, one notable tech critic asks an important question: which of these streams should drive AI development?
Yesterday, neural scientist, AI scholar and outspoken OpenAI critic Gary Marcus took to X-formerly-Twitter to blast OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's brand of incessant AI hype.
"Sam keeps doubling down on bigger and bigger promises that are harder to keep," Marcus wrote. "Did Elizabeth Holmes do the same?"
The post was accompanied by a picture of Altman's head superimposed over a portrait of the infamous conwoman, whose $9 billion blood-testing company Theranos collapsed after investigators discovered its leaders had deceived investors by wildly overhyping their tech's abilities.
Marcus' comment came just hours after Altman published a characteristically strident essay, "The Gentle Singularity," in which he claims that "humanity is close to building digital superintelligence" — something which a lot of experts in the space say is patently false.
Altman bit back in response, fuming that he respects Marcus' "commitment to the bit." Marcus is a longtime critic of Altman's chosen model of AI production, "scaling," where tech companies dump untold billions into ever-larger systems powered by more processing power and larger quantities of data, scraped without the permission of its original creators.
Though Altman projects nothing but confidence, the strategy's long-term prospects remain divisive. It took a hit earlier this year, for instance, when Chinese company DeepSeek released a large language model (LLM) roughly equal to OpenAI's ChatGPT, developed for a fraction of the cost.
"Can't tell if he is a troll or just extremely intellectually dishonest," Altman continued in his broadside against Marcus. "Hundreds of millions of happy users, 5th biggest website in the world, people talking about it being the biggest change to their productivity ever... we deliver, he keeps ordering us off his lawn."
For his part, Marcus says he has no problem with OpenAI's commercial achievements, per se.
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