For a more dangerous age, a delicious skewering of current AI
Brandon McGee
“NYU professor and entrepreneur Gary Marcus has been a relentless critic of modern deep learning forms of AI. He talked with ZDNet about what he hopes to accomplish with the book, Rebooting AI, and with his startup company, Robust.ai.
‘The net effect of a tendency of many in the media to overreport technology results is that the public has come to believe that AI is much closer to being solved than it really is,’
Systems such as OpenAI’s massive natural language program, “GPT-2,” introduced this past February, are ‘pretty impressive but totally incoherent,’ he points out.
‘We are very optimistic about what AI could do, and we are depressed about how little has been accomplished,’
As a scholar and critic, and now an entrepreneur, Marcus is engaged in a debate that sometimes breaks out on Twitter with the luminaries who defend current AI. They include Facebook’s AI research director, Yann LeCun, and the University of Toronto professor Geoffrey Hinton who also works at Google’s Google Brain unit.”
