Is deep learning approaching a wall? - He doesn't make a concrete prediction, which seems like a hedge to avoid looking silly later. Similarly, I noticed a hedge in this post:
Of course it ain’t over til it’s over. Maybe pure scaling ... will somehow magically yet solve ...
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But the paper isn't wrong either:
Deep learning thus far is data hungry - yes, absolutely
Deep learning thus far is shallow and has limited capacity for transfer - yes, Sutskeyer is saying that deep learning doesn't generalize as well as humans
Deep learning thus far has no natural way to deal with hierarchical structure - I think this is technically true, but I would also say that a HUMAN can LEARN to use LLMs while taking these limitations into account. It's non-trivial to use them, but they are useful
Deep learning thus far has struggled with open-ended inference - same point as above -- all the limitations are of course open research questions, but it doesn't necessarily mean that scaling was "wrong". (The amount of money does seem crazy though, and if it screws up the US economy, I wouldn't be that surprised)
Deep learning thus far is not sufficiently transparent - absolutely, the scaling has greatly outpaced understanding/interpretability
Deep learning thus far has not been well integrated with prior knowledge - also seems like a valuable research direction
Deep learning thus far cannot inherently distinguish causation from correlation - ditto
Deep learning presumes a largely stable world, in ways that may be problematic - he uses the example of Google Flu Trends ... yes, deep learning cannot predict the future better than humans. That is a key point in the book "AI Snake Oil". I think this relates to the point about generalization -- deep learning is better at regurgitating and remixing the past, rather than generalizing and understanding the future.
Lots of people are saying otherwise, and then when you call them out on their predictions from 2 years ago, they have curiously short memories.
Deep learning thus far works well as an approximation, but its answers often cannot be fully trusted - absolutely, this is the main limitation. You have to verify its answers, and this can be very costly. Deep learning is only useful when verifying say 5 solutions is significantly cheaper than coming up with one yourself.
Deep learning thus far is difficult to engineer with - this is still true, e.g. deep learning failed to solve self-driving ~10 years ago
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So Marcus is not wrong, and has nothing to apologize for. The scaling enthusiasts were not exactly wrong either, and we'll see what happens to their companies.
It does seem similar to be dot com bubble - when the dust cleared, real value was created. But you can also see that the marketing was very self-serving.
Stuff like "AGI 2027" will come off poorly -- it's an attempt by people with little power to curry favor with powerful people. They are serving as the marketing arm, and oddly not realizing it.
"AI will write all the code" will also come off poorly. Or at least we will realize that software creation != writing code, and software creation is the valuable activity
I think it would help if either side could be more quantitative about their claims, and the problem is both narratives are usually rather weaselly. Let's take this section:
>Deep learning thus far is shallow and has limited capacity for transfer - yes, Sutskeyer is saying that deep learning doesn't generalize as well as humans
But they do generalize to some extent, and my limited understanding is that they generalize way more than expected ("emergent abilities") from the pre-LLM era, when this prediction was made. Sutskever pretty much starts the podcast saying "Isn’t it straight out of science fiction?"
Now Gary Marcus says "limited capacity for transfer" so there is wiggle room there, but can this be quantified and compared to what is being seen today?
In the absence of concrete numbers, I would suspect he is wrong here. I mean, I still cannot mechanistically picture in my head how my intent, conveyed in high-level English, can get transformed into working code that fits just right into the rather bespoke surrounding code. Beyond coding, I've seen ChatGPT detect sarcasm in social media posts about truly absurd situations. In both cases, the test data is probably outside the distribution of the training data.
At some level, it is extracting abstract concepts from its training data, as well as my prompt and the unusual test data, even apply appropriate value judgements to those concepts where suitable, and combine everything properly to generate a correct response. These are much higher-level concepts than the ones Marcus says deep learning has no grasp of.
Absent quantifiable metrics, on a qualitative basis at least I would hold this point against him.
On a separate note:
> "AI will write all the code" will also come off poorly.
On the contrary, I think it is already true (cf agentic spec-driven development.) Sure, there are the hyper-boosters who were expecting software engineers to be replaced entirely, but looking back, claims from Dario, Satya, Pichai and their ilk were were all about "writing code" and not "creating software." They understand the difference and in retrospect were being deliberately careful in their wording while still aiming to create a splash.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00631
Here are some of the points
Is deep learning approaching a wall? - He doesn't make a concrete prediction, which seems like a hedge to avoid looking silly later. Similarly, I noticed a hedge in this post:
Of course it ain’t over til it’s over. Maybe pure scaling ... will somehow magically yet solve ...
---
But the paper isn't wrong either:
Deep learning thus far is data hungry - yes, absolutely
Deep learning thus far is shallow and has limited capacity for transfer - yes, Sutskeyer is saying that deep learning doesn't generalize as well as humans
Deep learning thus far has no natural way to deal with hierarchical structure - I think this is technically true, but I would also say that a HUMAN can LEARN to use LLMs while taking these limitations into account. It's non-trivial to use them, but they are useful
Deep learning thus far has struggled with open-ended inference - same point as above -- all the limitations are of course open research questions, but it doesn't necessarily mean that scaling was "wrong". (The amount of money does seem crazy though, and if it screws up the US economy, I wouldn't be that surprised)
Deep learning thus far is not sufficiently transparent - absolutely, the scaling has greatly outpaced understanding/interpretability
Deep learning thus far has not been well integrated with prior knowledge - also seems like a valuable research direction
Deep learning thus far cannot inherently distinguish causation from correlation - ditto
Deep learning presumes a largely stable world, in ways that may be problematic - he uses the example of Google Flu Trends ... yes, deep learning cannot predict the future better than humans. That is a key point in the book "AI Snake Oil". I think this relates to the point about generalization -- deep learning is better at regurgitating and remixing the past, rather than generalizing and understanding the future.
Lots of people are saying otherwise, and then when you call them out on their predictions from 2 years ago, they have curiously short memories.
Deep learning thus far works well as an approximation, but its answers often cannot be fully trusted - absolutely, this is the main limitation. You have to verify its answers, and this can be very costly. Deep learning is only useful when verifying say 5 solutions is significantly cheaper than coming up with one yourself.
Deep learning thus far is difficult to engineer with - this is still true, e.g. deep learning failed to solve self-driving ~10 years ago
---
So Marcus is not wrong, and has nothing to apologize for. The scaling enthusiasts were not exactly wrong either, and we'll see what happens to their companies.
It does seem similar to be dot com bubble - when the dust cleared, real value was created. But you can also see that the marketing was very self-serving.
Stuff like "AGI 2027" will come off poorly -- it's an attempt by people with little power to curry favor with powerful people. They are serving as the marketing arm, and oddly not realizing it.
"AI will write all the code" will also come off poorly. Or at least we will realize that software creation != writing code, and software creation is the valuable activity