Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus argues to Alex Kantrowitz that scaling compute no longer yields exponential capability jumps, citing Elon Musk's Grok 3.
“So he built Grok three and by his own testimony, it was 10 times the size of Grok two. It's a little better, but it's not night and day, right? Grok two was night and day better than the original Grok. GPT four was night and day better than GPT three. GPT three was night and day better than GPT two. Grok three is like, yeah, you can measure it. You can see that there's some performance, but for 10 X, The investment of data, compute, and not, not to mention cost of energy to the environment, it's not 10 times smarter by any reasonable measure. It just isn't.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Gary Marcus
PredictionHeld up
Marcus: A death will be tied to an LLM within a year
“The prediction that I made Is basically that there will be a death tied to a large language model in the next year.”
Gary MarcusSep 13, 2022▶ 48:29Is AI Dangerously Overhyped? — With Gary Marcus
AssertionSupported
Marcus: OpenAI's Project Orion failed and became GPT-4.5
“So OpenAI tried to build GPT-V and they had a thing called Project Orion and it actually failed. And eventually got released as GPT four and a half. So what they thought was going to be GPT five just didn't meet expectations.”
Gary MarcusMay 7, 2025▶ 3:34Are We at the End of Ai Progress? — With Gary Marcus
AssertionSupported
Marcus: Models like o1 are not systematically better than GPT-4
“Models like O-I are not systematically better than GPT-IV. There's, they're better in certain use cases. Especially ones where you can create data in advance.”
Gary MarcusMay 7, 2025▶ 11:46Are We at the End of Ai Progress? — With Gary Marcus
Opinion
Marcus: 'Reasoning' AI models only mimic patterns without genuine abstractions
“Now, the reason I wouldn't call them reasoning models, though you're right that many people do, is what I think they're doing is basically copying patterns of human reasoning. They're getting data about how humans reason certain things, but the depth of reason…”
Gary MarcusMay 7, 2025▶ 11:55Are We at the End of Ai Progress? — With Gary Marcus
Opinion
Marcus: AI scaling laws are no longer true
“So the scaling quote laws were empirical guesses about how these models work and they were true for a little while, which was amazing. And they're not true anymore, which is also amazing in a way.”
Gary MarcusMay 7, 2025▶ 14:30Are We at the End of Ai Progress? — With Gary Marcus
Opinion
Marcus: OpenAI is not worth $300B and won't IPO at $3T
“I don't think LLMs will disappear. I think they're useful, but this, yeah, the valuations don't make sense. I mean, I don't see open AI being worth three hundred billion dollars. And you have to remember that venture capitalists have to like 10 X to be happy o…”
Gary MarcusMay 7, 2025▶ 28:04Are We at the End of Ai Progress? — With Gary Marcus
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, over 300 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.