289 · Tier 5 — High-leverage niche and emerging figures

Gary Marcus

Writer, Marcus on AI; scientist

AI position

Focused on x-risk

Recurring Senate testimony, FLI pause letter, AGI-definition paper, and running p(doom) commentary.

Why influential

Defines how AI and technology power are understood by policymakers, investors, researchers, workers and the broader press. Primary policy lanes: ai reliability; regulation; safety; industry power.

Who pays attention

AI researchers, policymakers, foundations, technology journalists, safety advocates and industry critics

Work samples

AI-world contacts

  • Yoshua Bengio — Professor, Turing laureate, Mila / UdeM

    • Hosted / interviewedsource · interview · Dec 23, 2019 — Live public debate: Yoshua Bengio and Gary Marcus debate AI — "In late December, the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA) hosted a two-hour debate between Gary Marcus and Yoshua Bengio."

  • Ben Goertzel — AGI researcher, CEO, SingularityNET

    • Hosted / interviewedsource · interview · Jan 1, 2025 — Dr. Ben Goertzel's Conversation with Dr. Gary Marcus at the World AI Summit 2025 — The article is a full transcript of a hosted conversation/discussion at the World AI Summit 2025 between Ben Goertzel and Dr. Gary Marcus. Goertzel introduces himself: "I'm Ben Goe

  • Yann LeCun — Chief AI Scientist, Meta AI

    • Quoted / citedsource · direct quote · Jun 1, 2022 — Open letter responding to Yann LeCun — The piece is an open letter addressed directly to LeCun, quoting his own words to the author: LeCun "asked me a question yesterday on LinkedIn," and is quoted as having called Marc

  • Eric Schmidt — Tech executive, AI policy figure, Former Google CEO / Schmidt Sciences

    • Quoted / citedsource · direct quote · Oct 2025 — A Definition of AGI (co-authored paper) — Eric Schmidt is listed among the co-authors of the paper "A Definition of AGI" (arXiv:2510.18212), alongside ~33 other contributors.

  • Subbarao Kambhampati — AI professor, Arizona State University (planning/reasoning in LLMs)

    • Quoted / citedsource · direct quote · Apr 1, 2025 — A knockout blow for LLMs? — "Rao told me in a message this morning," introducing a direct comment from Kambhampati about LRMs learning to approximate the unfolding of an algorithm over increasing inference le

  • Miles Brundage — , Ex-OpenAI policy researcher

    • Quoted / citedsource · direct quote · Dec 31, 2024 — Where will AI be at the end of 2027? A bet — "Miles Brundage is an independent AI policy researcher. In October, he left OpenAI, where he worked for six years." The piece is co-authored/co-created with Brundage as the counter

  • Ken Forbus — AI professor, Northwestern University (qualitative reasoning, commonsense AI)

    • Quoted / citedsource · direct quote · Sep 1, 2023 — Doug Lenat, 1950-2023 (quotes Ken Forbus on the Cyc project) — "As the AI researcher Ken Forbus of Northwestern University put it to me in an email this morning, 'The Cyc project was the first demonstration that symbolic representations and re

  • Douglas Lenat — , AI pioneer; founder of Cycorp and creator of the Cyc knowledge base project

    • Quoted / citedsource · direct quote · Sep 1, 2023 — Doug Lenat, 1950-2023 — "one of the most brilliant, acerbily funny people I have ever met" — Marcus writes as someone who personally collaborated with Lenat, co-authoring a ~40,000 word paper and completi

  • Ernest Davis — AI/computer science professor, NYU; frequent co-author with Marcus on AI reasoning critiques

    • Quoted / citedsource · direct quote · Aug 1, 2020 — How Not to Test GPT-3 (co-authored with Ernest Davis) — The piece is explicitly titled/credited "How Not to Test GPT-3 (co-authored with Ernest Davis)" and the fetched text confirms: "Ernest Davis is listed as co-author alongside Gary M

  • Demis Hassabis — Co-founder & CEO, Google DeepMind

    • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Jul 1, 2026 — Breaking: Demis Hassabis endorses preflight safety testing for AI — Marcus quotes Hassabis's publicly posted essay/statements on X (e.g., "Initially, Frontier Labs would voluntarily share models with the Standards Body for review up to 30 days befo

  • Elon Musk — Founder, xAI

    • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Feb 1, 2025 — Elon Musk's terrifying vision for AI — "Elon Musk thinks this is funny" (referring to a screenshot Musk posted/reacted to showing Grok's output); "Grok 3 is designed to be a nuclear propaganda weapon, and Musk is proud
    • Published their op-edplaced · op-ed · Aug 1, 2023 — Open letter addressed directly to Musk critiquing his AI approach; both also co-signed the FLI 6-month pause letter.

  • Sam Altman — CEO, OpenAI

    • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Jan 1, 2025 — BREAKING: Sam Altman concedes that we need major breakthroughs beyond mere scaling to get to AGI — Marcus quotes Altman's public video remark, "on the research perspective, I bet there is another new architecture to find that is going to be as big of a gain as transformers [were

  • Dario Amodei — Co-founder & CEO, Anthropic

    • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Jan 1, 2025 — Dario Amodei, hype, AI safety, and the explosion of vibe-coded AI disasters — Marcus cites a tweet from @aiedge_ quoting Amodei: "Coding is going away first, then all of software engineering." No direct contact between Marcus and Amodei is indicated; the quo

  • Fei-Fei Li — Professor, Co-director, Stanford HAI

    • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Aug 1, 2024 — An open letter to Fei-Fei Li concerning California's proposed AI regulation, SB-1047 — "We've known each other for a long time and I very much respect your work." The piece is an open letter responding to Li's own Fortune op-ed opposing SB-1047 (linked, not directly

  • Geoffrey Hinton — Professor emeritus, Nobel laureate, University of Toronto

    • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Jan 1, 2023 — Hinton vs Musk — "Geoff Hinton and I have notoriously disagreed for years on many things. On his new post, I am in full 100% agreement:" — Marcus is citing/agreeing with a post Hinton wrote elsewhe

  • Dan Hendrycks — Executive Director, Center for AI Safety

    • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Oct 2025 — A Definition of AGI (co-authored paper, Marcus among 33 authors) — The document is the arXiv paper itself ("A Definition of AGI"), not journalism about Hendrycks. Author byline: "Dan Hendrycks, Dawn Song, Christian Szegedy, Honglak Lee, Yarin Gal,

  • Helen Toner — Director of Strategy, Georgetown CSET

    • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · May 30, 2024 — Disturbing and misleading efforts to defame Helen Toner through misdirection — Marcus quotes Toner's prior public statements (e.g., "For years, Sam had made it really difficult for the board...by withholding information, misrepresenting things"; "the board wa

  • Stuart Russell — Professor, UC Berkeley

    • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Jan 1, 2024 — AI red lines (cites Stuart Russell) — "(Stuart Russell gives a good discussion of criteria for devising red lines, with possible examples here.)" — linking to Russell's own UNESCO paper (people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~russe

  • Eliezer Yudkowsky — Co-founder, MIRI

    • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Jan 1, 2023 — p(doom) (discusses Yudkowsky's near-100% p(doom)) — "Eliezer Yudkowsky seems to put it at near 100%"; "I don't self-identify as a 'doomer' (unlike say Eliezer Yudkowsky who may)"; Yudkowsky "claims that AGI will kill us all by defau

  • Daniel Kokotajlo — , Ex-OpenAI governance researcher; AI-safety whistleblower

    • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Nov 1, 2025 — BREAKING: The AI 2027 doomsday scenario has officially been postponed — "AGI ain't actually coming in 2027, and even Kokotajlo, known for his aggressive timelines, is now with me in thinking we probably won't see AGI this decade." — no interview, quote

  • Andrej Karpathy — AI researcher; co-founder OpenAI, ex-Tesla AI, ex-DeepMind

    • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Oct 2025 — Game over. AGI is not imminent, and LLMs are not the royal road to getting there. — "Andrej Karpathy, a widely-respected machine learning expert who once ran AI for Tesla and twice worked for OpenAI, just said agents aren't anywhere close, and that AGI is a decade

  • Vinod Khosla — Venture capitalist, founder of Sun Microsystems, major OpenAI investor, Khosla Ventures

    • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Sep 1, 2025 — Peak bubble — "Quoting investor Vinod Khosla from yesterday, 'Most [AI] valuations are bonkers'." — Marcus cites a quote Khosla gave to The Information, not obtained by Marcus himself.

  • Ilya Sutskever — Co-founder, Safe Superintelligence Inc. (formerly OpenAI Chief Scientist)

    • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Jan 1, 2025 — How o3 and Grok 4 Accidentally Vindicated Neurosymbolic AI (cites Sutskever on scaling flattening) — "Hinton and Sutskever continued [after their seminal 2012 article on deep learning] to staunchly champion deep learning." — cited via Karen Hao's book Empire of AI, describing Suts

  • Rich Sutton — AI researcher, Turing Award laureate; reinforcement-learning pioneer

    • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Jan 1, 2025 — Game over for pure LLMs. Even Turing Award Winner Rich Sutton has gotten off the bus. — Marcus quotes Sutton's 2019 essay "The Bitter Lesson" and cites a tweet summarizing Sutton's remarks on a podcast: "My jaw just about fell out of my head a few minutes ago when I r

  • François Chollet — AI researcher (creator of Keras, ARC-AGI benchmark)

    • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Dec 21, 2024 — o3, AGI, the art of the demo, and what you can expect in 2025 — "such as major advances on Francois Chollet's ARC task"; "A lot of fans quoted some positive words from an essay by Chollet yesterday on the new results... 'it is important to note

  • John Jumper — DeepMind researcher, AlphaFold co-creator, Nobel laureate

    • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Oct 9, 2024 — Two Nobel Prizes for AI, and Two Paths Forward — "Chemistry went half to David Baker (for developing novel proteins) and half to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for their work on AlphaFold." / "Hassabis and Jumper's AlphaFold2 is

  • Greg Brockman — Co-founder/President, OpenAI

    • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Mar 1, 2024 — OpenAI's Lies and Half-Truths — Marcus quotes an August 2020 email from Greg Brockman (then OpenAI co-founder/CTO) responding to his request for GPT-3 beta access: "Thanks for reaching out. We have tens of thousa

  • Andrew Ng — AI researcher/entrepreneur, DeepLearning.AI / Coursera

    • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Jan 8, 2024 — The desperate race to save Generative AI — "Prominent machine learning expert Andrew Ng, who is involved in many GenAI companies (in part through his Landing.AI) and presumably has a large financial interest in the outcome,

  • Melanie Mitchell — Professor, Santa Fe Institute; AI researcher

    • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Jan 1, 2024 — Note praising Melanie Mitchell's analysis of AI benchmarking — "Excellent analysis of why benchmarking in AI has so often go awry, by Melanie Mitchell." — referencing Mitchell's article "On Evaluating Cognitive Capabilities in Machines (and Ot

  • Max Tegmark — Co-founder, Future of Life Institute

    • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Nov 27, 2023 — Hinton vs LeCun vs Ng vs Tegmark — "Meanwhile Tegmark and LeCun had some back and forth" on X regarding AI regulation; Marcus writes: "As much as Ernie Davis and I utterly disagreed with Tegmark's more technical map

  • Sébastien Bubeck — AI researcher, Microsoft Research; lead author of "Sparks of AGI" (GPT-4) paper

    • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Mar 1, 2023 — The Sparks of AGI? Or the End of Science? — Article quotes/embeds Bubeck's own tweet: "At @MSFTResearch we had early access to the marvelous #GPT4 from @OpenAI for our work on @bing. We took this opportunity to document our

  • Rodney Brooks — Roboticist/AI researcher, co-founder of iRobot

    • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Jun 6, 2019 — Robust.AI launches to build an industrial-grade cognitive platform for robots (co-founded with Gary Marcus) — "Coming from different perspectives, Marcus (cognitive science) and Brooks (robotics) have been writing for the last several years about the perils of deep learning, and why it had

  • Timnit Gebru — Founder, DAIR

    • Social interactiondirectness unclassified · Apr 1, 2025 — Public LinkedIn post directly criticizing a Gebru post as 'deceitful,' part of an ongoing exchange over AI risk framing.