Gary Marcus bets $1M that AI in 2027 won’t beat Nobel-level scientists
GaryMarcus · x · 2026-07-23
Gary Marcus says he wishes Dario had taken his bet: he publicly offered to wager $1 million that AI in 2027 will not be "smarter than Nobel Prize winners across most fields in science and engineering."
He argues that the current evidence does not support that claim:
- A Stanford study by Chenglei Si reportedly finds that LLM-generated ideas lead to worse projects than human ideas.
- The April LLM-SRBench benchmark suggests LLMs still struggle to infer causal laws.
- Even chess, with its stable and well-defined rules, remains hard for current AI to reason about reliably.
- A recent post by skdh is cited as evidence that LLMs are error-prone when reasoning about physics beyond simple regurgitation.
The post frames the bet as a way to challenge overly optimistic AGI timelines.
Related event: Gary Marcus Bets Heavily Against AI Surpassing Top Scientists Soon(2 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- US chases AGI dominance while China, EU and ASEAN treat AI as public infrastructure — BubblyExtent1693 · 2026-10-27
- Lab monkeys at $30-80K each: a 4-year breeding cycle is the real preclinical drug bottleneck — zebird0 · 2026-10-27
- CJR: journalists should stop hyping AI's supposed humanity — just say 'rogue' — ShakeelHashim · 2026-10-27
- PhD applicant emails up 4x YoY due to AI — writing without AI now makes you stand out — AI4Code · 2026-10-27
- Weil's collapse shows BigLaw dies from eroding belief, not a broken business model — jkubicki · 2026-10-27
- All 8 Transformer paper authors left Google, and rival labs captured most of the frontier value — signulll · 2026-10-27