Gary Marcus

Gary Marcus is an American professor of psychology, author, and entrepreneur. His research focuses on language, computation, artificial intelligence, and cognitive development and has been published widely in journals, including Science and Nature. He is a professor emeritus at New York University (NYU), the founder and former CEO of Robust.AI, and the founder and former CEO of Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company acquired by Uber in 2016. Marcus is the author of five books, the editor of two more, and has been published extensively in fields ranging from human and animal behavior to neuroscience, genetics, linguistics, evolutionary psychology, and artificial intelligence. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, Marcus is now based in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Gary Marcus was born on February 8, 1970, in Baltimore, Maryland. Between 1986 and 1989, Marcus attended Hampshire college, graduating with a BA in cognitive science. He then attended MIT to study for a Ph.D. in cognitive science, completing it in 1993. Marcus's mentor during his Ph.D. was Steven Pinker, an experimental psychologist who is now a Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.

Gary Marcus's research on language, computation, artificial intelligence, and cognitive development has been published widely, including in journals such as Science and Nature. In September 1997, Marcus became a professor at New York University (NYU) in psychology and neural science. He has authored five books, edited two more, and has had pieces published in The New York Times, Wired, Discover, and The Wall Street Journal. He has also written a series of blogs on neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence for The New Yorker.

Marcus is known for his criticism of deep learning and the claims its proponents have made regarding its potential use. His critique focuses on language models such as GPT-2, Meena, and now GPT-3, arguing these models are based on "brute force" approaches. In February 2020, Marcus published a 60-page long paper titled "The Next Decade in AI: Four Steps Towards Robust Artificial Intelligence," in which he stated:

These things are approximations, but what they're approximations to is language use rather than language understanding. So you can get statistics about how people have used language and you could do some amazing things if you have a big enough database. And that's what they've gone and done. So you can, for example, predict what's the next word likely to be in a sentence based on what words have happened in similar sentences over some very large database of gigabytes of data, and often, locally, it's very good. The systems are very good at predicting category. So if you say I have three of these and two of these, how many do have in total? It will definitely give you a number. It will know that a number is supposed to come next because people use numbers in particular contexts. What these systems don't have at all is any real understanding about what they're talking about.

Geometric Intelligence was founded in 2014 by Douglas Bemis, a recent NYU graduate with a Ph.D. in neurolinguistics, and three professors: Gary Marcus; Zoubin Ghahramani, a Cambridge professor of machine learning and a fellow of the Royal Society; and Kenneth Stanley, a professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida. The company was incubated at NYU Tandon’s Data Future Labs. Geometric Intelligence's research focused on how to make AI systems and agents that can do object or scenario recognition using smaller sets of data than are normally required.

The company was acquired by Uber on December 5, 2016, with its team providing the core for a new central AI lab being established at Uber’s SF HQ. As part of the acquisition, Gary Marcus joined Uber as director of its new artificial intelligence research arm.

In June 2019, Marcus launched a new company called Robust AI, alongside the following:

• Rodney Brooks (CTO), cofounder of iRobot and Rethink Robotics, co-inventor of Roomba, and former director of the MIT Computer Science and AI lab (CSAIL)
• Mohamed Amer (Chief Science Officer), former Senior Technical Manager at the Center for Vision Technologies, SRI International.
• Anthony Jules (COO), former CTO of Formant.io, Senior Product Manager at GoogleX, and COO & VP of Product at Redwood Robotics (acquired by Google)
• Henrik Christensen, Qualcomm Chancellor's Chair of Robot Systems, Professor of Computer Science at University of California San Diego (UCSD), director of UCSD’s Contextual Robotics Institute, and Co-Founder of ROBO-Global ETF

Marcus became CEO of the company. The company's goal is to build a smarter generation of robots, that rather than operating in assembly lines, can work in a wide range of environments such as homes, retail, elder care, and construction. Robust.AI is building a software stack for building and rapidly deploying semantically aware robots capable of a wider variety of tasks. This aims to help companies launch more robust robots faster, with more layers of safety, in the real world. The company's first software suite is called "Grace," which uses a no-code system to integrate robots into a workplace setting. Robust.AI’s first hardware product concept is called "Carter," which aims to change how people collaborate with robots in the warehouse.

On October 28th, 2020, Robust.AI announced $22.5 million in new financing led by Jazz Venture Partners and joined by previous investor Playground Global. The funding enables expansion for platform development and early partnerships. Other investors in the company include angel investor Esther Dyson, Veritas software cofounder Mark Leslie, Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn, and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Blank.

In June 2022, Robot.AI announced Anthony Jules moved into the role of CEO.

Marcus is the author of five books, including the New York Times bestseller Guitar Zero and Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.

Published on April 13, 2001, The Algebraic Mind, Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science, attempts to integrate two theories of how the mind works. One theorizes the mind is a computer-like manipulator of symbols, and the other states the mind is a large network of neurons working together in parallel.

Published on December 1, 2004, The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates The Complexities of Human Thought, Gary Marcus writes about the nature vs. nurture debate by linking the findings of the Human Genome Project to the development of the brain. The book explores how a small number of genes can contain the instructions for building the human brain.

Edited by Gary Marcus to be a supplement to introductory texts, The Norton Psychology Reader was published on December 19, 2005. The book contains contemporary writings on the study of human behavior, including brief readings, mostly from popular trade books, that are both relevant and interesting to introductory students.

Published on January 1, 2008, in Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, Gary Marcus discusses the brain as not an elegantly designed organ, but instead a "kluge"—a clumsily, cobbled-together contraption.

Published on January 1, 2012, Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning describes Gary Marcus learning to play the guitar using tools he has developed in his career as a psychologist.

Edited by Gary Marcus and Jeremy Freeman, The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists was published on November 20, 2014. The book includes original essays from leading researchers in the field, including Christof Koch, George Church, Olaf Sporns, and May-Britt.

Published on September 10, 2019, Rebooting AI - Building Artificial Intelligence we can Trust was co-authored by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis. The two authors offer an analysis of the current state of artificial intelligence.