Gary Marcus: 'Doomer' talk won't kill us by 2030, it just made frontier AI labs richer
GaryMarcus · x · 2026-09-11
Gary Marcus pushes back on ex-OpenAI/Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon's claim on Anderson Cooper's show that humanity might not survive five more years.
- He argues the net effect of a decade of 'Doomer' talk has been to make frontier AI companies wealthier and more powerful
- Defends Coxon against character attacks: AI-generated misinformation about his tenure; he spent 2+ years on OpenAI's technical team, hardly entry-level
- Some of Coxon's claims are true, some speculative; media rarely distinguishes
- AI harms are real, but obsession with absurd end-of-the-world fantasies has made things worse
- Cites Anthropic's Evan Hubinger corroborating Coxon's accusation of frontier-lab hubris
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