Gary Marcus

Not everyone who shapes artificial intelligence does it from a neural-network lab. Gary Marcus, a cognitive psychologist and language scientist trained in the cognitive science tradition of MIT (where he earned his doctorate under Steven Pinker), came to AI from a different direction: the human brain and its limits. From there he started asking the questions that made many people uncomfortable. Does a model that predicts the next word truly understand language? Or does it just imitate it very well?

For years, while the field rode ever-louder waves of enthusiasm, Marcus kept pointing out what AI models didn't do well: systematic reasoning, robust generalization, common sense. Those critiques sparked heated debates, but history has borne him out on many points. In 2019, together with mathematician Ernest Davis, he published "Rebooting AI", a book Forbes named one of the seven must-reads on artificial intelligence: not an apocalyptic manifesto, but a rigorous diagnosis of where the field fell short and where it needed to aim. In May 2023 he was one of three experts invited to testify before the US Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on AI risks and regulation, in the same hearing as OpenAI's Sam Altman.

Marcus also built from the inside. In 2014 he founded Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning startup acquired by Uber in 2016 to form its AI research team. In 2019 he founded Robust.AI, a company focused on trustworthy AI for robots in industrial environments. He has written for years on his Substack "Marcus on AI" with thousands of subscribers, and was recognized in the TIME 100 AI 2023, the list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence.

To me, Gary Marcus's lesson is about the courage to say what others don't want to hear. In a field that sometimes looks more like a cult than a science, you need people willing to put their hands on the cold stove, point out what isn't working, and demand we fix it before pressing forward. Every time you use an AI tool and wonder "but does it actually understand what it's doing?", there is a little bit of Marcus behind that question.