21 researchers from Stanford, Oxford, DeepMind argue LLMs are a dead end to AGI
GaryMarcus · x · 2026-09-05
Gary Marcus amplified a new paper, Visual General Intelligence, co-authored by 21 researchers from Stanford, Oxford, DeepMind, CMU and Meta, arguing that LLMs will never lead to true AGI.
Key claims:
- The current playbook — feeding web-scale text into Transformers and scaling parameters to get emergent reasoning — has limits GPT demonstrated but cannot escape;
- Text is a compressed, human-abstracted symbol system lacking physics, geometry, and raw reality;
- The authors argue genuine general intelligence must be grounded in visual/physical perception, flipping the scaling paradigm.
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