AI Is Dumber Than Investors Think — ft. Gary Marcus

25:22That's what I mean. I'll say, is this right? They go, yeah, you're right. You're right. Even if the thing is totally wrong. And then I go to Google and learn that I'm wrong. But the model will tell me, no, you're right. You're the great. You're the best. So we're in this, I don't know, awkward space where they do some things that feel magical. right so brainstorming for some people I don't get that much out of them but I'm working in disciplines I know well if you're working in an area that you don't know very well it'll give you a few things to get started it feels magical alright so there are some things that are good about them even though I'm not rattling them off personally they're clearly good at writing code and so forth but they come with these consequences too right they come with the consequences that they make stuff up that they are so asky that they lead people into delusions.

26:12This has been documented a number of times and so forth. And so society has to make a decision. And the initial decision was, well, we'll just let it all ride. There's so much fun to play with that who cares what, you know, the consequences are. And what the subpoena, which was, I think, filed by New York State, but is part of a larger, I think, 46 states or something that are involved, is a statement that, no, we're not going to let all this ride. Like, you know, there are different theories about how to proceed. One would be, if you cause all of these problems, you should be held responsible for all those problems.

26:48There should be financial penalties. There should be warnings, et cetera, et cetera. Another is, like, maybe you shouldn't distribute the product until you can fix these, right? And there are different ways to address it. But the initial reaction was to just completely give a free ride to companies like OpenAI and say, hey, these are great. And now society is waking up and saying, hey, there are a lot of consequences. We have, you know, suicides that seem to be tied to these things. And we have the delusions. You know, we're destroying the educational system because the students are using these things.

27:18And we're ruining critical thinking skills. And so, you know, what the companies want to do is this famous phrase, I actually tried to find the origins, but it's so old I couldn't find. But it is to privatize the gains and socialize the costs. Right? They want to make a whole society accept the cost while they get rich. And what we have seen in the last 12 months, I would say, is a real sea change. I wrote a book in 2024 called Taming Silicon Valley. And I said, wake up, everybody. The oligarchs are going to take over. They're going to screw us all. And nobody even read the book. I mean, not zero, but, you know, it got a little bit of attention.

27:55They will now. I think it missed its moment. But, you know, it came out too soon. But two years later, like, this is what everybody is thinking about, right, is how are we going to rein this stuff in? And there's this huge backlash now. Some of it's about data centers. Some of it's about employment. There's a lot of different reasons for it. But society is no longer content to say you can do whatever you want with us, right? That is what this attorney general's thing, right? You know, the subpoena, if you look at it, is about like 15 different issues or something like that. It's very broad. They want to know what are the consequences of this stuff, and they want to know what the companies are going to do about it.

28:34And they have looked around and seen that there are a lot of negative consequences. You know, what I told the Senate when I was there in May 23, sitting next to Sam Altman, was you have a lot of risks here. And everything, I haven't gone back to the original remarks, but I believe that everything that I warned about is now, in fact, here and more real than it was. So I warned about cybercrime, and I warned about misinformation, And I don't think I even knew about sycophants. I think there have been new ones that were introduced. But basically, by and large, all of those things are worse now than they were three years ago.

29:07And now the public has woken up. The attorney generals have woken up. You know, we went through a period where I think the LLM companies thought they were going to get off scot-free. And now it doesn't look like that. And it shouldn't be that way, right? You know, another analogy would be people dumping chemicals, you know, factories dumping chemicals in the water. We shouldn't let them do that. We should not socialize this cost to society. If you're going to dump chemicals in the water, you should do something about it. You should be penalized for it and so forth. I think we've finally reached the point where people are recognizing that for AI.

29:39And by the way, important asterisk, the Trump administration was completely opposed to any AI regulation substantive in any form except maybe about non-consensual deep-pig porn until about a month and a half ago, maybe a month ago. And now they have finally realized that what, you know, Marc Andreessen was telling them was nonsense, right? What Marc Andreessen was telling them is you can't have AI and innovation at the same time and regulation, so have no regulation. And now we've entered a regime where the U.S. government is actually thinking in a somewhat ham-fisted way, but is actually thinking about how you regulate this stuff.

30:16And that is proper, right? We should have public debate about how to regulate AI. Somehow Andreessen and a few others had, you know, so-called Overton windowed their way into making the debate about whether to have regulation at all. That was always going to be a stupid idea, but they pushed it for two years, two solid years. But now that's over. Now, you know, people are realizing like, hey, the government has put a regulation on Anthropoc. That's not really fair. It should be across the board. And is it the right one? And so the Overton window has actually shifted back to which regulation is the right one, which is actually what the 2024 book was about.

30:52And now is the time to have that debate. Which is encouraging. And I would just point out, I think the reason that you didn't have that is because Marc Andreessen in Silicon Valley, they had their guy in the White House in David Sachs. And now he's out. And as you point out, I wonder if that's the reason why we're starting to see some inklings of interest in regulation. I wouldn't accept that particular, or I think there's more nuance to that. Like, I mean, I think the thing that really did flip it was mythos was actually scary to some people in the government. Until then, I think people in the, and I'm speculating from the outside.

31:27Until then, people in the government thought, eh, we don't need to regulate this stuff. It's fine. It'll be fine. It wasn't really fine, mind you. We were having delusions. They didn't care about that. We were having other problems. But when Mythos came along, they were like, yeah, this is not really fine. This is actually a problem. And so I think that flipped it. Maybe that drove Sachs out. I don't know. But I don't think it's just about him. Sachs was definitely very opposed to regulation. His view is no longer in favor. But I think it is Mythos that kind of flipped it. Some of it was an overreaction to Mythos.

31:58But it's a good overreaction because it did make people realize you cannot just look at this stuff forever and say, oh, it's all going to be fine. It's not going to be fine. Even if Mythos is not quite as scary as I think some in the media have represented it to be, you know, some version of this really is going to be that scary. It's not that far away. And we do need to figure out how we're going to handle it. So I think it's like, we've had two dress rehearsals now. We fucked them both up. The first one was initially we just let ChatGPT ride completely without any consideration for consequences of society.

32:33That was bad. The second one is mythos. Mythos is not actually the AI that is going to destroy the world that some people hear. But the way that this one's been fucked up is it's been used as a political tool to destroy a particular U.S. company. Like, that is not a thing, right? Like, I may not sound like an arch-capitalist, but I'm enough of a capitalist to think that, like, companies should mostly stand on their two feet and they should, you know, be allowed to prosper and, you know, as long as they're not doing really bad things. And what's happening is, you know, the current administration is like, we don't like the way you dress, so we're going to screw you.

33:09Like, that is not capitalism. That is really putting a thumb on the scale. That is also fucking up a dress rehearsal. Yeah. Just on Mythos, the Mythos model, this was going to be my next question because a lot of the coverage that we have seen on Mythos, this is Anthropics' new model that came out recently, was that it is so powerful that something's going to go wrong here. It was essentially the story that we've been hearing. And I mean, I've talked with people in the cybersecurity industry. They looked at this thing and they were worried about this. And we saw a lot of the cybersecurity stocks were plummeting.

33:46So I guess my question to you is, where do you stand on Mythos? Because we know that your views on generative AI and their limits. but how do we foot that next to the fact that people are very scared about this thing that is supposedly extremely powerful? So, I mean, I think one needs a nuanced view on mythos, I guess in a couple of ways. One is it probably works partly like cloud code, which is to say it's not a pure generative AI model. There's actually a harness there. The harness is directing some of the cybersecurity investigations and so forth. So first bit of nuance is it is actually a little bit of a different architecture.

34:27The second thing is it is oversold, but it's also real in the sense that, like, it can do a bunch of things that its predecessors could not. A lot of the things, if a system is well secured, are not going to be a problem. But the reality is that people have blown off cybersecurity for a long time. and there are a lot of systems that are not well secured. So you're not going to use mythos to break into U.S. government things. And there's a footnote there where Mark Warner misunderstood something that blew up over the Internet and he just didn't get it right. You know, he got something secondhand from the NSA and he wasn't a specialist in this or whatever.

35:07But, you know, you really can do some things in limited circumstances. Most of them are still kind of demonstrational rather than real world. it's not going to break into the cybersecurity of Google that's actually really set up well. But if somebody Vibe codes, you know, something for their pub to, you know, track merchandise or something like that, that's not going to be set up well. Like Vibe coding does not set up security well, and that is going to be vulnerable. So there are lots of systems in the world that are vulnerable to Mythos. The best ones are not. Maybe a hacker who knows what they're doing could use Methos as part of a larger thing to attack some of those.

35:48But probably the best secured systems, banks and so forth, are not immediately vulnerable. But the weaker systems, and there are a bunch of weaker systems, really are vulnerable. And so it really is a wake-up call that we need to get our cybersecurity game in better order. And there's a footnote there, which is why is it not in better order? A lot of it has to do with stigma. Like there's stigma for mental illness, so nobody talks about depression, but it's actually common or, you know, whatever. There's stigma around cybersecurity. So people get hacked all the time. We don't have even good numbers on that.

36:26They pay ransoms. We don't have good numbers on that. And they let shit slide. They don't really know how to deal with it. And so that stuff is a mess. And sooner or later, a moment was going to come when it was going to, you know, be bad. And that moment has partly come. So we do have, I don't personally, but there are people in the world who have the knowledge for how to make a system sufficiently secure. And they're going to have a lot more business right now because most people have, you know, kind of deferred maintenance. Like you think of a metaphor of a house. Like most people don't deal with the roof until it's leaking, right?

37:01You know, you tell them you should, but they don't. And cybersecurity is kind of that way. It's like, you know, you don't want to do it this quarter. It's going to hurt your quarterly reports. And you don't know how bad your neighbor is because your neighbor actually did have to deal with it, but they didn't want to tell you about it because they were embarrassed. And so cybersecurity was a mess, and Mythos really is making it worse. It's not, you know, it's not Lex Luthor's magical cyber hacking system or whatever that people are terrified of, but it is real. Yeah, I like the house metaphor. it's almost like you'd rather buy a flat screen tv than than fix the roof it's a more fun and sexy thing to invest in exactly there's been so much of that this cyber security has really been secondary this has changed that and it's a good thing that it changed that we'll be right back and for even more markets content sign up for our newsletter at profgmarkets.com

38:08When you finally find your thing, you want the whole world to know about that thing. So you use a thing called Canva to make it an even bigger and better thing. Whether you want to create flyers for that thing, make presentations for that thing, or design merch for that thing, you can do anything. So people can see your thing, feel your thing, love your thing. The next thing you know, it's a thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more.

38:51Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. That's indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. I see you. Avatar Fire and Ash is now streaming on Disney+. It's the film critics are calling the best Avatar yet. Go, go, go, go! A true epic and completely jaw-dropping. This is the only purest thing in this world. Return to Pandora on Disney+. It will be an adventure for the whole family.

39:28And watch the Oscar-winning phenomenon at home. This is sick! Avatar Fire and Ash, now streaming on Disney +, rated PG-13.

39:44We're back with Prof G Markets. Just on policy, you pointed out that before there was this ethos in Washington at the White House of no policy whatsoever. Any form of regulation is a form of stifling innovation. We're going to do nothing. and actually were going to issue an executive order, which forces states to do nothing. That was what we saw last year. You point out there's been a vibe shift here, some sort of sea change that's happened. Trump, at the beginning of this month, issued a new executive order, which would basically will ask tech companies to give government the oversight that they believe they need over their new models before they're released to the public.

40:26It's still voluntary, right? And it's still narrow. So what they put in place is a step, right? Mostly it's a symbolic step in a certain way because what they have asked for now is the companies will voluntarily provide their models so the government can do cybersecurity checks. What you really want is, first of all, for that to be mandatory, right? Meta actually hasn't agreed yet, right? They probably will because they can look really bad if they're the only one that doesn't. but so you really want it to be mandatory and you don't want it to be just about cyber security so think about all the things that new york state um and really all the states are suing about or investigating about like i don't know let's take sycophancy and delusions right you really want to investigate all of these companies so sycophancy wasn't really a problem before a model called gpt 4-0 the sycophancy where it sucks up to you it existed before but it wasn't this serious problem But 4.0 was much more sycophantic.

41:24I actually saw some data on this the other day. And we believe that a lot of these cases of delusions were tied to 4.0's increased sycophancy. So, you know, you want to be able to find that before it gets out to the market, right? If you're releasing something to, well, ChatGPT now, OpenAI has a billion customers. You know, if you have a billion customers, you have an impact on the world, there should be some kind of pre-screening like with FDA approval, right? So, you know, with FDA approval, like, you have this drug, you know that it helps with cancer, but it also gives people heart attacks, right?

41:57And so you're like, well, you know, what are the cost benefits here? So you know that the cell helps people, but you also know it hurts a bunch of people. And you should evaluate that before you release it at scale. Yeah, I mean, we saw a similar thing with the state of Florida, which sued OpenAI for essentially playing a role in a mass shooting. their contention is that there was sufficient evidence from this clearly mentally ill child who was interacting with the model and talking about this and they didn't do anything about it. And so that, I mean, we don't know the details exactly on like what the conversation with the model actually looked like, but I could certainly see a world in which it's not doing enough to push back or to prevent further delusions on a psychiatric level.

42:50So I think that we're starting to see real evidence there. I am interested that you're feeling optimistic about the executive order from Trump, because, you know, I agree with you, it's notable and it's significant that they're doing something. But when I look at the something that they're doing, to me, you can't even call it regulation. If they're just asking companies, hey, would you mind sending over some stuff? Please, thanks. To me, that's not regulation at all. And I'm starting to see that what little regulation we are seeing, what little policy we are seeing coming out of Washington, to me, seems very stupid and very misguided.

43:31Like, I mean, the Trump executive order as one, plus his new suggestion, I'd be interested to hear what you think. But the suggestion that the U.S. government should start acquiring stakes in these AI companies, something that is now kind of proposed or backed by Bernie at the same time. I would also go to the data center moratorium. I don't think that that's a good idea to simply say you're not allowed to build data centers anymore. I guess my point being, it seems that there's almost no nuance whatsoever in Washington when it comes to AI regulation. So I'd be curious to hear what you think the right move is going forward and how that might play out?

44:09First of all, I very much agree with, you know, what you're saying overall, right? So what's in place is too weak, most of it. Some of it's too strong in crazy ways. There's no nuance in most of what's there. There are a few people, I think, have done some things that are nuanced, but they never make it out of committee. So, I mean, if you actually look at the bills, people like Blumenthal and Hawley, for example, who were at the proceedings that I spoke at at the Senate, have actually proposed some reasonable things, but they're stuck in committee. So it's not that nobody is paying attention.

44:46But the dynamics of money and power and all the lobbying and stuff means that most of the nuanced stuff doesn't get very far. It does exist, but it's not getting far. I think that let's talk about the stake part. I think that that's kind of crazy. Partly because I thought we were going to talk about economics, but we haven't got there. These companies are losing money, right? I mean, probably your audience has already heard it. I think Zitran was here recently. The companies are losing money. This is a backdoor bailout, right? You know, Bernie has his own reasons for wanting to do this. But the reason Altman wants Trump to do this and is whispered in Trump's ear is because Altman knows he can't make ends meet, right?

45:32He is burning money at a massive pace. He's building the same technology as the other guys. He's lost ground. OpenAI, I saw somebody argue recently, might be in fourth place. They were in first place by anybody's definition in 2023, right? But in 2026, they're not. They're burning money. They're losing ground. Of course they want anything they can do to prop them up, including taking money from the U.S. government. And so, first of all, the government should not be running these companies. Like, they should supervise them. But we want, like, some arm's length here, right? Like, I saw that G7 meeting with the, you know, the G7 leaders and the tech leaders, and no scientists in the room, nobody from civil society, right?

46:18This is, you know, we don't want to crystallize that with government ownership of these companies and no independent oversight. And we don't want to burn U.S. taxpayer money on an industry that, as far as I know, has no real business model. I mean, NVIDIA has a business model. They're selling shovels in the gold rush. If you want to take a stake in them, that would make more sense. But, like, there is no sustainable business model yet established. The best you can say is that for coding, they can actually bring in revenue, but it costs so much money to do the coding. It's not clear they can make the revenue.

46:55So you have these companies that basically never made a profit, and we're just going to give them money and let them burn the money, and we're going to take on that risk? No, let them stand on their own capitalism. And, you know, the government's job is to regulate them. That would be one of the worst outcomes. I mean, and it's something that they talked about. I mean, the CFO literally said, maybe we'd need some form of government backstop eventually. I don't know if those were the exact words, but it's been suggested by leadership at OpenAI before. That was going to be on loan guarantees for data centers was what they floated, right?

47:29Which is a version of a bailout. I mean, on the business model, what do you think happens here? Because, yeah, we did have Ed Zitrin on the podcast. I recently wrote an article going into just how profitable or unprofitable these companies are. For OpenAI, the answer is extremely. They lost, you know,$21 billion on operating profit, unprofitable, lost$21 billion on an operating profitability basis last year. So they're burning$2 billion a month, basically. That's right. Just to operate that company. And that's, I mean, the real net loss was$39 billion, but there's some nuance there. But something we can say with a good amount of certainty is that on a day-to-day basis, when you add it up over the calendar year, OpenAI is currently burning$21 billion.

48:15Every time you use their product, they lose money, right? That's the better way to put it. Anthropic also loses money, but less money. My question to you, do they ever figure this out? do they ever turn a profit? The way I've been thinking about it is like they need to thread a needle. There are so many things going against these companies that it is extremely unlikely that they're going to thread this needle. So let's think about some of the things that they need to deal with. One is that they're building this big, expensive technology, and they might get disintermediated by somebody who builds it better and more efficiently.

48:54So you should not need to train on the entire internet with a computer, you know, massive computer, unthinkably large computer in order to do anything intelligent. Like you didn't train on the entire internet, but you're a smart guy, right? You didn't need the whole internet. You run on like 20 watts of power. You have some pizza or some sushi or whatever. You don't need to, you know, right? So one is they're just like insanely inefficient. If somebody else comes along with a more efficient thing, then they're all hosed. And like, you might not need all of these data centers if somebody comes up with more efficient.

49:29Then you have the problem that everybody is using the same secret formula. It's not just that they're all building toothpaste, they're all basically building the same toothpaste, right? And so like, we're seeing this now, right? There was this crazy, crazy period earlier in this year, the era of the token maxing, which lasted about a month. And in the era of token maxing, you had companies reward their employees for using as many tokens, as much AI as possible. They had like leaderboards. Amazon had a leaderboard. It doesn't actually make sense. I mean, what you really want to know is, are the results good?

50:02And, you know, every study that's looked at productivity has shown they're not all that great. And so suddenly a lot of companies got worried and they're not doing token maxing anymore. And in fact, this morning I saw a term for the first time, which was called the tokenpocalypse, right? The tokenpocalypse is that suddenly everybody's like, we shouldn't use so many tokens. And tokens that we should use, maybe we should use cut rate models. They're not quite the best models. Maybe they come from China, but so what? We saved some money. Even Microsoft is saying, maybe you should use DeepSkid sometimes.

50:36Because Microsoft is like, nobody wants to pay these prices. We're going to have to cut them somehow. So, you know, I was saying that you have to, you know, thread this gauntlet, right? So one thing is that people might make more efficient models with altogether different technologies. Another thing is that nobody can charge very much money for tokens because it's just this price war because everybody's building exactly the same thing. And, you know, there was a period of a month where people didn't care and they're like, you know, that's all right, I'll have another drink. I don't care how much it was because the companies were all you cannot eat buffets, but they've stopped that.

51:12So you have to solve that. Then you have the reliability problems, right? Those still aren't solved. The hallucination problems still aren't solved. And so when companies try this stuff out, most of the experiments wind up with the results not being that great. Like there's been 10 studies now or something like that showing most customers are not finding return on productivity. So the customers may eventually say, this was fun while it lasted, but I'm not really getting the results. It doesn't really warrant this. I'll let somebody else figure it out. The whole thing has been driven by FOMO. I don't want to be the guy who doesn't use AI when you're using AI, and so you wipe me out.

51:51But if I try for a year and a half or three years or whatever, it is still not really making a difference either for me or you. I might say, fuck it. When it works better, I'll come back. But right now, not so much. Any of those things just wipes out a company like Anthropic or OpenAI that already is, as you say, burning lots of money, right? And so if customers leave for any reason or somebody makes a better technology or somebody makes a cheaper version of the same thing that's almost as good, then you're in deep trouble. It's not even clear in the best case that any of these companies have a good business model.

52:26I mean, they're not making profits. And, you know, it's just so delicate. Yeah. Do you believe that that will be the outcome for, say, an open AI? I've been warning for three years that I think open AI is going to be the we work of AI. And when I said that in, I think it was November of 2023, people looked at me like my head was screwed on backwards. I mean, they just did not believe that that was remotely possible. But now, you know, every other week I read somebody writing something, making the same analysis, like Sebastian Maliby in The New York Times. Like, it has gone from a crazy idea to an idea that a lot of people are having, right?

53:04The economics don't make sense. And what they kept doing is playing double or nothing with funding because they were burning so much money. So they would increase the valuation, they get somebody to write a bigger check, but it's not clear who can write the check that they need next time. So now they're talking about IPO, but they have a problem with the IPO to raise, you know, the next round of funding, which is that Anthropica's basically the same product for the same valuation, but they're doing better commercially, you know, burning less money. and like OpenAI's reputation is declining, partly because I think Altman is a really untrustworthy individual.

53:38We don't need to go into that, but I've written about it a lot. And so, you know, a lot of people are leaning towards Anthropic. Anthropic is getting market share. So why would I put a trillion dollars in a company that is burning money, that has a competitor that is rising while they're falling, that seems to be better run, maybe has a little bit better technical vision? Like, it just doesn't make sense. The argument would be why. Why? Because the technology is rapidly improving. The technology is a kind of technology the likes of which we haven't seen. Everybody's technology is to the extent that you accept that it's rapidly improving, which I think is actually controversial.

54:16But, you know, it's improving in some ways and not others. It's not actually improving on reliability and hallucinations and so forth. But in any case, in the ways in which it is improving, which are some of the ways you want but not all, the competitors all are too like you have to think about the relative ranking and the cost right the relative ranking of open ai is clearly declining by any reasonable measure you know less market share less reputation etc and everybody else is catching up like it used to be people thought the chinese models were a year behind now they think they're like four months behind or something like that.

54:52And, you know, Anthropoc is ahead, Google is ahead. There is no argument, no rational argument for buying a share of OpenAI at a trillion dollar valuation. There just isn't. I agree with that, by the way. I guess the part I wanted to clarify, the Ed Zittrens of the world, if there are more people who have his view, is that none of it's going to work. OpenAI isn't going to work. Anthropoc's not going to work. The idea is that the costs to build this stuff are just too damn high, and the revenues for these products will not exceed the costs, ultimately, over the long term. My view is that I think that there is a path to profitability for, basically, for Anthropic, is my view.

55:40I think that there's a world in which they can make it work. In other words, there will be winners, and there will be dramatic losers. and I would agree with you. I think that we believe that OpenAI will be a huge loser. I guess the point I'd love for you to clarify, will they all lose or will there be winners? Is Gen AI itself doomed or is there a world in which they make it work not only in terms of making it useful but also making it a profitable business that makes more money than it spends? I'm a little bit closer to you than to the other, Ed. I don't know for sure. I think it's very much TBD.

56:19You know, I would certainly sooner take a bet on Anthropic than on OpenAI. I think that they're a sounder company in multiple ways. It is TBD, whether this stuff can be made to be profitable. It's not completely out of the question. I think part of the question is, like, can they find a niche? Like, is coding enough of a niche? Well, not so far, right? Because coding is a$570 billion a year industry. They're not going to get all of it. You know, the people have fantasies that they can get all of it. And the costs are so high. You know, like, it's really hard to know the future in full detail. Maybe they can find enough of those niches and they can eat something out.

56:58They may never warrant the trillion-dollar valuation that they're looking for, right? You know, there's an intermediate possibility, which is they do become a profitable company. They figure out enough cost to make and so forth. But really, they're basically a company that makes like$20 billion a year on a pretty big capital outlay. And it's like, it's not really the best way to invest money, but they eat by. Like, maybe that's the intermediate position is like, they don't go out of business. They make a profit, but they were not really worth a trillion dollars investment. You could have spent that trillion dollars in a better way.

57:30Like, maybe that's the reality, which is kind of a little bit closer to you than to Ed Citron. But, you know, I mean, maybe that's what it is. We don't quite know. You know, there's another story where the only people who really make money off of this, aside from the chip companies, are places like Google that already have the infrastructure and the distribution. They don't really need to make that much money on it. They just need to make sure they don't get this intermediated. There's a bunch of different possibilities. We don't know for sure. OpenAI is clearly the weak link in the chain. Anthropic is still in it.

58:03We don't really know if they'll make it or not. That would be my take. Yeah. No, I think that makes sense. Gary, you've been very generous with your time just before we end here. What would be your final message to people listening? Maybe they read about AI, they've heard about AI, they're thinking about it in their day-to-day lives. But what do you think people don't know enough about? What's the myth that you would want to dispel? I think the myth right now is that generative AI is close to so-called AGI, artificial general intelligence, and it's going to solve all our problems. This is just not true.

58:40We're going to find some what we call domain-specific applications. Coding is maybe the best one so far, where we can actually use these tools for something. But they're not magic. They're not all-purpose intelligence. And we need to make fundamental discoveries before we get there. And we should ask ourselves as a society, there's an idea of an explore versus exploit tradeoff. And we're completely in the exploit LLMs rather than explore other options. China is less so. I think we're running a risk by going completely crazy into the LMs, which China is not doing, that we're going to get the ones left behind because we committed too early to the wrong technology.

59:21Like, you know, are we building a billion Betamaxes where VHS might not be better, but it's cheaper? Or maybe that's not the perfect analogy. But like where there's some other technology here that is actually the right one. When so blind to the LLMs or to anything really, the alternatives to the LLMs, are we making a mistake by doing that? I mean, look at China. They're making a lot of infrastructure bets on LLMs, but it's like, I think it's maybe 20 cents on our dollar. That gives them room to play if there's something else developed. We are like, we're going to buy these companies. We're going to put our entire, you know, economy into it.

59:57Like, I think that's a mistake. And we should be more like, how could we explore other approaches to intelligence? Which requires understanding intelligence as more than just what's good to me. And at a deeper level, learning some cognitive science and maybe reflecting more deeply on what it is that we want to build and how we want to build our society around it. Yeah, and what it means to be intelligent. Gary Marcus is a leading voice in artificial intelligence. He's a scientist, emeritus professor of psychology and neural science at NYU, and an entrepreneur. He was the founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, acquired by Uber.

1:00:31He is also the author of six books, including his most recent work, Taming Silicon Valley, which anticipated the rise of tech oligarchs. His 2023 US Senate testimony next to Sam Altman was watched by millions. He is well known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance. Gary, we really appreciate your time. Thanks very much. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Jorge Carty. Our research team is Dan Chalan, Isabella Kinsel, Kristen O'Donoghue and Mia Silverio.

1:01:07Jake McPherson is our social producer. Drew Burrows is our technical director. and Catherine Dillon is our executive producer. Thank you for listening to Prof G Markets from Prof G Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow and join us for a fresh take on markets on Monday.

1:01:27Lifetimes

1:01:32You have me In kind Reunion

1:01:44As the world turns

1:01:49And the dark flies In love

1:02:01This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile, with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop.

1:02:34With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just$15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment. Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three-month plan, equivalent to$15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. The right window treatments change everything. Your sleep, your privacy, the way every room looks and feels. At Blinds.com, we've spent 30 years making it surprisingly simple to get exactly what your home needs.

1:03:07We've covered over 25 million windows and have 50 ,000 five-star reviews to prove we deliver. Whether you DIY it or want a pro to handle everything from measure to install, we have you covered. Real design professionals. Free samples. Zero pressure. Right now, get up to 50 % off with minimum purchase. Plus, get a free professional measure at Blinds.com. Rules and restrictions apply.