Comment by bbor

I always love a Marcus hot take, but this one is more infuriating than usual. He’s taking all these prominent engineers saying “we need new techniques to build upon the massive, unexpected success we’ve had”, twisting it into “LLMs were never a success and sucked all along”, and listing them alongside people that no one should be taking seriously — namely, Emily Bender and Ed Zitron.

Of course, he includes enough weasel phrases that you could never nail him down on any particular negative sentiment; LLMs aren’t bad, they just need to be “complemented”. But even if we didn’t have context, the whole thesis of the piece runs completely counter to this — you don’t “waste” a trillion dollars on something that just needs to be complemented!

FWIW, I totally agree with his more mundane philosophical points about the need to finally unify the work of the Scruffies and the Neats. The problem is that he frames it like some rare insight that he and his fellow rebels found, rather than something that was being articulated in depth by one of the fields main leaders 35 years ago[1]. Every one of the tens of thousands of people currently working on “agential” AI knows it too, even if they don’t have the academic background to articulate it.

I look forward to the day when Mr. Marcus can feel like he’s sufficiently won, and thus get back to collaborating with the rest of us… This level of vitriolic, sustained cynicism is just antithetical to the scientific method at this point. It is a social practice, after all!

[1] https://www.mit.edu/~dxh/marvin/web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/pa...