Gary Marcus is a leading voice in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. The co-founder of the Center for the Advancement of Trustworthy AI, he is well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI (artificial intelligence), anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance, and has been a leading advocate of neurosymbolic AI for three decades. In outstanding testimony before the U.S. Senate, an energizing TED Talk, an exceptional New York Times Q&A, and on CBS’ 60 Minutes, Marcus has emerged as a prominent voice urging for international AI research and regulation.
Trained by Steven Pinker, he received his PhD from MIT at age of 23 and was a professor at NYU for 20 years before becoming Founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company, which was acquired by Uber in 2016.
As Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU, he is also known for his research in human language development and cognitive neuroscience. He is the author of five books, including the bestseller “Guitar Zero” (2012). His 2001 book “The Algebraic Mind” foreshadowed the hallucination problem that plague current AI systems. “Rebooting AI,”(2019), with Ernest Davis, calls for fundamental changes in how we approach artificial intelligence and was one of Forbes’s 7 Must Read Books in AI.
His 2022 article “Deep Learning is Hitting a Wall” initially enraged many AI researchers but was ultimately named one of Pocket’s Best Tech Articles of 2022. Its key conclusions –that current AI systems face serious limits in truth, comprehension and reliability—have now been widely accepted even by many of his most prominent critics.
Marcus is currently challenging the field in a series of articles at his substack, which has quickly become a leading blog on AI, and has just launched an 8-episode podcast, “Humans versus Machines.”
He has written for The New York Times, Wired, The Guardian, Time, and The New Yorker and many others, and is regularly quoted (New Yorker, New York Times Washington Post, etc.). In recent months, his realist’s perspective has been featured on The Ezra Klein Show, CNN, NPR, Sam Harris’s podcast and many more. As seen in a recent 60 Minutes appearance, Marcus has emerged as a prominent skeptic not of AI itself, but of the potential path that companies using AI may find themselves on if they do not adequately prepare themselves.