Gary Marcus Endorses Critique: LLMs Lack World Models, AGI Needs New Techniques
GaryMarcus · x · 2026-09-02
Gary Marcus quoted Jason Pontin's sober assessment of LLMs with a full endorsement. The argument: LLMs trained on all the world's text are phenomenally useful for search and surprisingly versatile generative tasks, but they lack theory of mind and world models, cannot compute continuously, go off the rails, and are ruinously expensive to train and run. Reaching AGI will require additional techniques—many neuro-cognitive—and AI workflows plus chips will evolve to be heterogeneous.
Related event: Gary Marcus: Neurosymbolic AI Rescues Pure LLM Scaling That Hit Its Ceiling(5 posts)→
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