The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 19 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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.”
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.”
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.”
Marcus: Gen AI's core business model will be surveillance and ads
“The business model of gen AI will be surveillance and hyper-targeted ads, just like it has been for social media.”
Marcus: Microsoft launched Bing Chat despite negative India test feedback
“And then the other really disturbing thing is that apparently they tested in India and got, you know, customer service requests saying it's not ready for prime time. And it was, you know, still put out.”
Marcus: Machines will convincingly conduct podcast interviews within 30 years
“And some point I'm going to say, 30 years from now. We'll be able to make machines that do podcast interviews and I won't really know. I don't really know if you're a person fake or, you know, machine faking me out or whatever at some point.”
Marcus: OpenAI's o3 hallucinates more than preceding models
“I'll give you just one more example is O three apparently hallucinates more than the models that came before it.”
Marcus: Microsoft study suggests chatbot usage impairs human critical thinking
“Well, Microsoft did a study, in fact, suggesting that critical thinking was getting worse as a function of them.”
Marcus: LLMs will connect to all major software within two years
“You have companies like Adept that are spending their whole time trying to quote, add all the world, connect all of the world's software to large language models. So if not now, soon enough. I think that that's right. Like, you know, two years if it's not toda…”
Marcus: AI is not close to fooling experts in hour-long conversations
“Well, I don't think we're that close to a system that's going to be able to, you know, if I have an hour with it, let's say just to be conservative. I don't think we're that close to a victory there.”
Marcus: AI deployment will not pause unless Congress steps in
“The bottom line is what's driving it, and it's not that likely, unless Congress steps in, that there will be a pause.”
Marcus: Google's LaMDA Has No Sensors Perceiving the Physical World
“Lambda actually has fewer sensors than my watch. My watch has a lot of sensors and lamb doesn't really have anything sensing the real world, except for its linguistic input.”
Marcus: Future AGI systems will require internal world models
“So I'm pretty confident that we'll have models of the world, internal ideas about how the world works. I don't see how to build an AI without it.”
Marcus: LLM-powered misinformation as a service will soon be widespread
“If what you want to do is to put out like 10,000 versions of something on Twitter, something untrue and find one that sticks, then misinformation as a service, which is how they might call it in the tech industry is a pretty damn powerful technique. And if it …”
Marcus: No companies using GPT technology are breakout successes
“So yeah, there's a ton of companies that are trying to use GPT's technology. I don't know any of them that are You know, breakout successes.”
Marcus: Generative image software is relatively easy to copy
“The issue there is the software itself is relatively easy to copy.”
Marcus: Vals AI benchmark shows LLM accuracy under 10% on financial charts
“Where they looked at things like, can you pull out a chart based on a series of financial statements, SEC statements from a bunch of companies and these systems all claimed to do it, but accuracy was under 10%. And overall on this new benchmark, accuracy was a…”
Marcus: AI Will Change Art but Humans Will Remain Creative Filters
“I think it probably will change art. I think in general that humans are still going to be like the creative inspiration and are often going to be filtering things.”
Marcus: An amateur Go player beat KataGo 14 out of 15 games
“There was another mind-blowing study this week that showed that one of the best Go programs, KataGo, could be fooled by some silly little strategy that would be obvious to a human player. But, you know, somebody was able to follow this strategy and, like, an a…”