Gary Marcus: prediction

Transcript context

…Well, I'm just interested in the bottom line numbers for the years. Like, we had this potential dispute about whether it's just LMs or whether it's neurosymbolic. I don't want to fight you about that. Like, we can say it's neurosymbolic if you like. We can say it's not automatic, but rather involves some new ideas. But the point is, I think it's going to happen in like 3 or 4 years. Yeah. So Okay, great. So I just think new ideas are hard to project. I'll give you my favorite example. In the early twentieth century, everybody thought genes were made of proteins. Somebody even won a Nobel Prize on that premise. They were all wrong. And it took a while for people to figure out that this is wrong. And Oswald Avery did these experiments in the 1940s, really ruled it out and, you know, discovered that by process of elimination that it was DNA. And it didn't take that long to move very fast in molecular biology once people got rid of the bad assumption. I think we're making some bad assumptions, but it's hard to predict when people will move past an EDA fix, which is where I think we are now. I mean, proving that is very hard. I can give a lot of you know, qualitative evidence to point in that direction. But there's at least a possibility that I'm right about that. If we don't have the right set of ideas, it depends on when we come up with new ideas. It could be that we automate the discovery of new ideas, but most of what LLMs have done is not discovery of new ideas. It's really exploiting existing ideas. So I would claim that timelines, there are many paths to it being shorter before 02/1930, for instance, but the picture that you point out of there are these various other cognitive abilities that are long unaddressed and this isn't a cherry picked distribution, this is actually what you would do if you're inspired by cognitive science or psychometrics. I think basically both positions are legitimate, but I think if you'd integrate them, there could be a bullish case that you'll be able to knock off some of this cognitive abilities by the end of the decade.…

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