Gary Fred Marcus (born 8 February 1970) is an American psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author, known for his research on the intersection of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence (AI). Marcus is professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University. In 2014 he founded Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company later acquired by Uber. His books include The Algebraic Mind, Kluge, The Birth of the Mind, and the New York Times Bestseller Guitar Zero.

Early life

Marcus was born into a Jewish family in Baltimore, Maryland. He developed an early fascination with artificial intelligence and began coding at a young age. Marcus majored in cognitive science at Hampshire College. He continued on to graduate school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he conducted research on negative evidence in language acquisition and regularization (and over-regularization) in children's acquisition of grammatical morphology. During his PhD studies, he was mentored by Steven Pinker.

Career

In 2015 Marcus co-founded a machine-learning startup, Geometric Intelligence. When Geometric Intelligence was acquired by Uber in December 2016, he became the director of Uber's AI efforts, but left the company in March 2017. In 2019 Marcus launched the startup, Robust.AI, with Rodney Brooks, iRobot co-founder and co-inventor of the Roomba. Robust.AI aims to build an "off-the-shelf" machine-learning platform for adoption in autonomous robots, similar to the way video-game engines can be adopted by third-party game developers.

Research

Marcus's early work focused on why children produce over-regularizations, such as "breaked" and "goed", as a test case for the nature of mental rules. In his first book, The Algebraic Mind (2001), Marcus challenged the idea that the mind might consist of largely undifferentiated neural networks. He argued that understanding the mind would require integrating connectionism with classical ideas about symbol-manipulation. Marcus's book, Guitar Zero (2012), explores the process of taking up a musical instrument as an adult. Marcus edited The Norton Psychology Reader (2005), including selections by cognitive scientists on modern science of the human mind. With Jeremy Freeman he co-edited The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists (2014).

Language and mind

Marcus belongs to the school of thought of psychological nativism. One of his books, The Birth of the Mind (2004), describes from a nativist perspective the ways that genes can influence cognitive development, and aims to reconcile nativism with common anti-nativist arguments advanced by other academics. He discusses how a small number of genes account for the intricate human brain, common false impressions of genes, and the problems they may cause for the future of genetic engineering. In a review, Mameli and Papineau argue that the theory expounded in the book is "more sophisticated than any version of nativism on the market", but that in attempting to rebut anti-nativist arguments, Marcus "ends up reconfiguring the nativist position out of existence", prompting Mameli and Papineau to conclude that the nativist-anti-nativist framing should "be abandoned".

Artificial intelligence

Marcus is a notable critic of the "hype" surrounding artificial intelligence. He has called for regulation of AI, increased AI literacy among the public, and "well-funded public thinktanks" to consider potential AI risks. He has also argued that AI is currently being deployed prematurely, particularly in situations that involve a risk of real-world harm resulting from bias, as with facial recognition or résumé parsing, since current deep-learning techniques are not amenable to formal verification for correctness. Marcus has described current large language models as "approximations to [...] language use rather than language understanding". On 29 March 2023, Marcus and other researchers signed an open letter calling for a 6-month moratorium on "the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4" until proper safeguards can be implemented, primarily citing the short-term risks of "mediocre AI that is unreliable [...] but widely deployed". In 2024 he rushed into press his latest book urging public action to regulate generative AI.

Partial bibliography

Books

Articles