Gary Marcus Explained

Gary Marcus
Birth Name:	Gary Fred Marcus
Birth Date:	8 February 1970
Birth Place:	Baltimore, Maryland, US
Education:	Center for Talented Youth
Alma Mater:	Hampshire College (BS) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MS, PhD)
Fields:	Cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence
Workplaces:	New York University
Thesis Title:	On rules and exceptions : an investigation of inflectional morphology
Thesis Url:	https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/12492
Thesis Year:	1993
Doctoral Advisor:	Steven Pinker

Gary Fred Marcus (born 8 February 1970) is an American psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author, known for his research on the intersection of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence (AI).^[1]

Marcus is professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University. In 2014 he founded Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company later acquired by Uber.^{[2] [3]}

His books include Guitar Zero^[4] and Kluge.^[5]

Early life

Marcus was born into a Jewish family in Baltimore, Maryland. He developed an early fascination with artificial intelligence and began coding at a young age.^[6]

Marcus majored in cognitive science at Hampshire College.^[7] He continued on to graduate school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he conducted research on negative evidence in language acquisition^[8] and regularization (and over-regularization) in children's acquisition of grammatical morphology.^[9]

During his PhD studies, he was mentored by Steven Pinker.^[10]

Career

In 2015 Marcus co-founded a machine-learning startup, Geometric Intelligence. When Geometric Intelligence was acquired by Uber in December 2016, he became the director of Uber's AI efforts, but left the company in March 2017.^{[11] [12]}

In 2019 Marcus launched the startup, Robust.AI, with Rodney Brooks, iRobot co-founder and co-inventor of the Roomba. Robust.AI aims to build an "off-the-shelf" machine-learning platform for adoption in autonomous robots, similar to the way video-game engines can be adopted by third-party game developers.^[13]

Research

Marcus's early work focused on why children produce over-regularizations, such as "breaked" and "goed", as a test case for the nature of mental rules.^[14]

In his first book, The Algebraic Mind (2001), Marcus challenged the idea that the mind might consist of largely undifferentiated neural networks. He argued that understanding the mind would require integrating connectionism with classical ideas about symbol-manipulation.^[15]

Marcus's book, Guitar Zero (2012), explores the process of taking up a musical instrument as an adult.

Marcus edited The Norton Psychology Reader (2005), including selections by cognitive scientists on modern science of the human mind.

With Jeremy Freeman he co-edited The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists (2014).

Language and mind

Marcus belongs to the school of thought of psychological nativism. One of his books, The Birth of the Mind (2004), describes from a nativist perspective the ways that genes can influence cognitive development, and aims to reconcile nativism with common anti-nativist arguments advanced by other academics. He discusses how a small number of genes account for the intricate human brain, common false impressions of genes, and the problems they may cause for the future of genetic engineering.^[16]

In a review, Mameli and Papineau argue that the theory expounded in the book is "more sophisticated than any version of nativism on the market", but that in attempting to rebut anti-nativist arguments, Marcus "ends up reconfiguring the nativist position out of existence", prompting Mameli and Papineau to conclude that the nativist-anti-nativist framing should "be abandoned".^[17]

Artificial intelligence

Marcus is a notable critic of the "hype" surrounding artificial intelligence. He has called for regulation of AI, increased AI literacy among the public, and "well-funded public thinktanks" to consider potential AI risks.^{[18] [19]} He has also argued that AI is currently being deployed prematurely, particularly in situations that involve a risk of real-world harm resulting from bias, as with facial recognition or résumé parsing, since current deep-learning techniques are not amenable to formal verification for correctness.^[20]

Marcus has described current large language models as "approximations to [...] language use rather than language understanding".

On 29 March 2023, Marcus and other researchers signed an open letter calling for a 6-month moratorium on "the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4" until proper safeguards can be implemented,^{[21] [22]} primarily citing the short-term risks of "mediocre AI that is unreliable [...] but widely deployed".^[23]

Partial bibliography

Books

• Marcus, G.; Davis, E. (2019). Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust. Pantheon/Random House.
• Marcus, G.; Freeman, J. (ed.) (2014). The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists. Princeton University Press.
• Marcus, G. F. (2012). Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning. The Penguin Press.
• Marcus, G. F. (2008). Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind. Houghton Mifflin.
• Marcus, G. F. (ed.) (2006). The Norton Psychology Reader. W. W. Norton.
• Marcus, G. F. (2004). The Birth of The Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought. Basic Books.
• Marcus, G. F. (2001). The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science. MIT Press.
• Marcus, G. F., Pinker, S., Ullman, M., Hollander, M., Rosen, T. J., Xu, F., & Clahsen, H. (1992). Overregularization in language acquisition. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 57(4), i-178.

Articles

• Marcus, Gary, "Artificial Confidence: Even the newest, buzziest systems of artificial general intelligence are stymied by the same old problems", Scientific American, vol. 327, no. 4 (October 2022), pp. 42–45.
• Marcus, Gary, "Am I Human?: Researchers need new ways to distinguish artificial intelligence from the natural kind", Scientific American, vol. 316, no. 3 (March 2017), pp. 58–63.
• Marcus, G. F., & Davis, E. (2013). How robust are probabilistic models of higher-level cognition? Psychological Science, 24(12), 2351–2360.
• Marcus, G. F., Fernandes, K. J., & Johnson, S. P. (2007). Infant rule learning facilitated by speech. Psychological Science, 18(5), 387–391.
• Marcus, G. F. (2006). Cognitive architecture and descent with modification. Cognition, 101(2), 443–465.
• Marcus, G. F., & Fisher, S. E. (2003). FOXP2 in focus: what can genes tell us about speech and language? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(6), 257–262.
• Marcus, G. F., Vijayan, S., Bandi Rao, S., & Vishton, P. M. (1999). Rule learning by seven-month-old infants. Science, 283(5398), 77–80.
• Marcus, G. F. (1998). Rethinking eliminative connectionism. Cognitive Psychology, 37(3), 243–282.
• Marcus, G. F., Brinkmann, U., Clahsen, H., Wiese, R., & Pinker, S. (1995). German inflection: The exception that proves the rule. Cognitive Psychology, 29(3), 189–256.

External links

• Substack

Notes and References

1. Web site: Machines that think like humans: Everything to know about AGI and AI Debate 3 . 2023-01-11 . ZDNET . en.
2. Web site: Etherington . Darrell . 2016-12-05 . Uber acquires Geometric Intelligence to create an AI lab . 2023-01-11 . TechCrunch . en-US.
3. News: 2016-12-05 . Uber Bets on Artificial Intelligence With Acquisition and New Lab . en-US . The New York Times . 2018-05-20 . 0362-4331.
4. Book: Guitar Zero by Gary Marcus PenguinRandomHouse.com . en-US.
5. News: 2008-05-04 . Editors' Choice - Book Review . en-US . The New York Times . 2018-05-20 . 0362-4331.
6. Web site: 2023-05-08 . "This is the teenage phase of AI. Tools with extraordinary power that are completely unreliable" . 2023-12-19 . ctech . en.
7. Web site: Gary Marcus 86F . 2023-01-11 . Hampshire College . en.
8. Marcus . Gary F. . 1993-01-01 . Negative evidence in language acquisition . Cognition . en . 46 . 1 . 53–85 . 10.1016/0010-0277(93)90022-N . 8432090 . 23458757 . 0010-0277.
9. Marcus . Gary F. . 1995 . Children's overregularization of English plurals: a quantitative analysis* . Journal of Child Language . en . 22 . 2 . 447–459 . 10.1017/S0305000900009879 . 8550732 . 46561477 . 1469-7602.
10. Web site: Anadiotis . George . November 12, 2020 . What's next for AI: Gary Marcus talks about the journey toward robust artificial intelligence . 2023-03-30 . ZDNet . en.
11. Web site: Bhuiyan . Johana . 2017-03-08 . Uber's new head of its AI labs has stepped down from his role . 2023-03-30 . Vox . en.
12. Web site: Fried . Ina . 2017-03-08 . The head of Uber's AI labs is latest to leave the company . 2023-03-30 . Axios . en.
13. Web site: Feldman . Amy . Startup Founded By Cognitive Scientist Gary Marcus And Roboticist Rodney Brooks Raises $15 Million To Make Building Smarter Robots Easier . 2023-03-30 . Forbes . en.
14. Marcus, G. F., Pinker, S., Ullman, M., Hollander, M., Rosen, T. J., and Xu, F. (1992). Overregularization in Language Acquisition. (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development). 57 (4, Serial No. 228). SRCD monograph?
15. Marcus, G.F., The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2001.
16. Marcus, G.F., The Birth of The Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought, New York, Basic Books, 2004.
17. Mameli . Matteo . Papineau . David . 2006-09-01 . The new nativism: a commentary on Gary Marcus's The birth of the mind . Biology and Philosophy . en . 21 . 4 . 559–573 . 10.1007/s10539-005-1800-7 . 1572-8404 . 59464488.
18. News: Marcus . Gary . 2022-08-07 . Siri or Skynet? How to separate AI fact from fiction . en-GB . The Observer . 2023-03-31 . 0029-7712.
19. News: The world needs an international agency for artificial intelligence, say two AI experts . The Economist . 2023-12-22 . 0013-0613.
20. Web site: Georges . Benoît . November 26, 2019 . " Les machines ne savent pas gérer les situations imprévues " . 2023-03-30 . Les Echos . fr.
21. Web site: Chavanne . Yannick . March 29, 2023 . Bengio, Musk, Wozniak et des centaines d'autres experts appellent à mettre en pause le développement des IA . 2023-03-30 . ICTjournal . fr.
22. Web site: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter . 2023-03-30 . Future of Life Institute . en-US.
23. Web site: Marcus . Gary . March 28, 2023 . AI risk ≠ AGI risk . 2023-03-30 . The Road to AI We Can Trust . en.