Yann LeCun resumes war of words with Gary Marcus

I dont engage in vacuous debates. Nor do I speculate about vague hypothetical proposals. I build stuff. You should try it sometimes: Yann LeCun to Gary Marcus. 

You have all the resources in the world. I don’t. But that doesn’t make your approach correct: Gary Marcus to Yann LeCun

After a brief lull, the war of words between Gary Marcus, a professor of Neural Science at NYU and an AI critic, and Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta, has resumed. Marcus is known for his beefs with AI researchers. Recently, he took a jab at LeCun and tagged him in a video of a Tesla crashing into a private jet.

In 2021, Marcus published an article on Nautilus, titled ‘Deep Learning Is Hitting a Wall’. The article spoke about the (wrong) direction the AI industry is headed. He cited the failure of self-driving cars to make his case.

LeCun responded to the Tweet:

Marcus also responded by asking LeCun, “Also, is it a pure convnet or a hybrid system?” In his 2017 debate with LeCun at the NYU Mind, Brain and Consciousness, Marcus had argued for the need for an innate machinery to push the boundaries of AI. A year later, LeCun responded to Marcus’ critique of deep learning, saying ‘the number of valuable recommendations ever made by Gary Marcus is exactly zero.’ 

In response to a comment on Marcus’ recent Tweet, LeCun said: “Deep Learning is a super-hot topic in radiology these days. If radiologists feel insulted by AI, why did they invite me to give a keynote at the Int. Soc. Magnetic Resonance Imaging conference?”

Here’s how their Twitter debate unfolded.