I get the appeal in an abstract sense. I get a real kick out of watching yet another Manchester United manager cock it up. But all I do is see the scores and enjoy a bit of schadenfreude. The audience for these guys seems highly enthusiastic about their content. It's like if I watched every United game to get as much enjoyment out of watching them suck.
It's particularly annoying because people are clearly not posting this guy because he's right often or because he's good at predicting stuff. They're posting because he's dunking on people they dislike.
He does more than dunks though, I don't think that's really fair to him. He's trying to position himself as a public intellectual and expert.
If I'm being honest, the combination of the HN audience and him is that he's just a dunk machine. It's all right. I get it. People here like this kind of content. I have to killfile the domain and users who post positively about it if I want to improve my personal feed. That's on me to curate rather than to post Yet Another Complaint Comment (the lesser known yacc).
The rapid rise and slow decline of Sam Altman
Let's be honest, Generative AI isn't going all that well
Marcus Weighs in (Mostly) for LeCun
Why ChatGPT can't be trusted with breaking news
The AI bubble is all over now, baby blue
Six (or seven) predictions for AI 2026 from a Generative AI realist
The Core Misconception That Is Driving American AI Policy
"Scale Is All You Need" Is Dead
ChatGPT 3 turned 3 today. It still hasn't come close to meeting expectations
A trillion dollars (potentially) wasted on gen-AI
Has the bailout of generative AI begun?
Yann LeCun originated none of his ideas
Hot take on Google's Gemini 3
The False Glorification of Yann LeCun
Sam Altman's pants are on fire
Is Vibe Coding Dying?
OpenAI probably can't make ends meet. That's where you come in
Five signs that Generative AI is losing traction Usage may be declining
Could China devastate the US without firing a shot?
Five signs that Generative AI is losing traction
Is vibe coding dying?
Erdosgate
AGI is not imminent, and LLMs are not the royal road to getting there
Game over for pure LLMs. Even Rich Sutton has gotten off the bus
New AI hype "Our language models are so 'conscious' we need to give them rights"
Peak Bubble
OpenAI's Future, Foretold?Sam has made bombastic claims that were key to his success along with his shrewdness in the business and tech world. Reporting on this and looking at how his public and private profile have changed are an important part of an open and free society as it helps the general public understand the people and forces shaping their world.
Is this particular article important in the grand scheme of things ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But I wouldn't throw the entire genre out
And for that I am forever thankful to Sam Altman and all the people who made this possible.
Why thank Altman and not thank Joe Biden? He was running the country when these models you praise were released, and they both had about as much real involvement in their actual construction.
The CEO didn't do the work, he shouldn't get all (or even most) of the credit.
He created and continues to create an atmosphere for innovation inside OpenAI that showed the way for the fast-followers.
He lit a fire under the ass of Google for gods sake.
Whatever he did or didn’t invent, he made a ton of invention possible.
Where to from here is uncertain but without sama maybe ChatGPT didn’t happen the same way - or maybe it crashed and people shrugged. Maybe in the other timeline that leads to another AI winter. But one thing is for certain, without sama the whole thing would’ve been a lot smaller.
I think it’s time to pony up.
Where are your vibe coded databases that take on SQLite and Postgres?
Where are your vibe coded Operating Systems?
Where are your vibe coded browsers?
Where are your vibe coded literally anything?
At a friend’s birthday last year, I wrote in the space of 8 minutes - then performed - a 3-minute long verse about said friend and their puppy. I didn’t get the verse from ChatGPT. I had it help me find rhyming words that fit the rhythm, had it help me find synonyms, and find punchy ends to sentences.
I made a xylophone iphone app way back in mid 2024 by copy pasting code to Claude and errors from Xcode, just to show off what AI can do. Someone asked to make it support dragging your finger across the screen to play lots of notes really fast - Claude did that in one shot. In mid 2024, 6 months before Claude Code.
I made a sorting hat for my sisters’ kids for Christmas a few weeks ago. I found a voice cloning website, had Claude write some fun dialogue, and vibe coded an app with the generated recordings of the sorting hat voice saying various virtues and Harry Potter house names. The cloned voice was so good, it sounded exactly like the actor in the movie. I loaded the app on my phone and hid a Bluetooth speaker in a Santa hat - tapping a button in the app would play a voice recording from the sorting hat AI voice. The kids unwrapped the hat and it declared itself as the sorting hat. Put the hat on a kid’s head, tap a button, hat talks! With a little sleight of hand, the kids really believed it was the hat talking all by itself. Laughing together with my whole family as the hat declared my cheeky niece “Slytherin!!!” was one of the most humanising things I’ve ever seen.
I’ve made event posters for my Burning Man camp. Zillions of dumb memes for group chats. You always have to do some inpainting or touch it up in an image editor, but it’s worth it for the lulz.
And right now I’m using Claude Code for my startup, ApprovIQ. Dario Amodei was right in a way: 99% of the code was written by Claude.
But sorry, no multi million line vibe coded codebases. For that my friend, you’ll be waiting until after the next AI winter.
Would love to hear how that could work.
Is this financial advice? :-)
It's always a way to lose a massive amount of money if you're wrong, so the advice is also contingent on confidence level.
And then maybe he might ... change the bet! when he was about to lose?
Maybe!
Who's to say, really? Certainly not me! I'm just a neural network!
Demanding that people gamble with their often limited finances to prove a point orthogonal to the one they're actually making feels disingenuous and dismissive to me.
"Team X is definitely winning, I'm certain". "So you'll offer me 1000-1 on the opponent?". "No". "6-1?", "No". They often realize they are about 65% certain at some point. And they often aren't being hyperbolic, they are just not thinking clearly.
Many of his criticisms of OpenAI and LLMs have been apt.
hiddencost•1h ago
He's been writing variants of this kind of thing for decades and he's always been wrong.
elliotec•1h ago
zelag•1h ago
There's many other people but most of them are independent. It is glaringly obvious now most of the media outlets are afraid to ask the tough questions.
throwitaway222•1h ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrgEZ8FeZEc
lkbm•36m ago
That said, MPU has been pretty solidly crazy with their LLM critiques lately (did you know it uses all the drinking water?!?!?). There are plenty of sane, grounded-in-reality critiques. Why not focus on those?
roadside_picnic•1h ago
I browsed back looking for posts of his that most obviously made predictions, and "GPT-5… now arriving Gate 8, Gate 9, Gate 10" make a few very clear predictions and was absolutely correct [0] about them.
This was in June 2024, and Marcus claims two major predictions:
- "As of today, I am more confident than ever that GPT-5 won’t land this year."
- "Gary Marcus is still betting that GPT-5 will continue to hallucinate and make a bunch of wacky errors, whenever it finally drops."
It would be over a year from his posting that article that GPT-5 would finally land, and his overall prediction that the result would be lack-luster was also spot on.
Again, I don't particularly care one way or another about Gary Marcus, but flat out dismissing his writing doesn't really hold up.
0. https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/gpt-5-now-arriving-gate-8-...
ccapitalK•1h ago