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 10 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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: Nobody knows how to prevent chatbots from being toxic or misleading
“Nobody knows, you know, how to make their chatbots constrained and not toxic and not spew misinformation.”
Marcus: AI coding assistants regurgitate public code but cannot debug software
“That's their sweet spot is regurgitation. And so Yeah, they can build the stuff that's out there, but if you want to code things in the real world, you usually want to code something that's new, and these systems have a lot of problems with that. And another r…”
Marcus: Pure transformer models lack mechanisms for truth and inherently hallucinate
“If you look at a completely pure case of a transformer model trained on a bunch of data, It doesn't have any mechanisms for truth. Now, except the sort of accidental contingency, and there are inherent reasons why these systems hallucinate, and maybe I can, in…”
Marcus: LLMs hallucinate because they cannot distinguish individuals from categories
“The way I think about it is that these things don't understand the difference between individuals and kinds. So I actually wrote about this twenty-some years ago in my book, The Algebraic Mind, and I gave an example there, which is I said, suppose it was a dif…”
Marcus: Current AI is a dress rehearsal showing we are not ready for AGI
“I, I've been thinking about this whole thing as a dress rehearsal. And before we didn't know how to make a dress rehearsal. This is a dress rehearsal for AGI. And you know, the lesson of the dress rehearsal is like, we are not ready for prime time. Let us not …”
Marcus: No established methodology exists for debugging chatbots or autonomous vehicles
“None of these chatbot systems are well-debugged. Nobody knows how to debug them, in fact. And so both the problem with GPT-III and with driverless cars is we don't actually have a methodology even for debugging it.”
Marcus: Generative AI Art Is Fully Derivative Sampling on Steroids
“And what these systems are doing is kind of like amazing enhanced version of sampling where you don't even recognize what the samples are anymore. It's all derivative.”
Marcus: AI Language Models Produce Convincing Text That Is Often Untrue
“If you talk about another domain, like language synthesis, it turns out that current systems can make very convincing language, but it's often bullshit. That doesn't matter in the same way in art. So in, if you have a system make up a news story, even if it's …”
Marcus: AI Art Generators Lack True Understanding or Intentionality
“And it's worth realizing that the art system doesn't really understand what it's doing. It's just correlating words with images in its database. It doesn't have the same intentionality about the objects as a person does, but it can still be a very effective te…”