Gary Marcus: if a system generates a million solutions and one passes Lean, credit the filter?
GaryMarcus · x · 2026-10-08
Gary Marcus continued his critique of a celebrated AI result, asking whether a system that generates a million candidate solutions with only one passing a Lean-based filter deserves credit — "monkeys and typewriters."
When challenged, Marcus clarified his "IF" signaled a hypothetical, not an assertion about how many solutions were actually generated, since nobody had been told. The exchange reflects a recurring debate over formal-math AI results: how much "intelligence" is in a generate-millions-then-verify pipeline.
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