Gary Marcus

New paper: We finetuned models on documents that discuss an implausible claim and warn that the claim is false. Models ended up believing the claim! Examples: 1. Ed Sheeran won the Olympic 100m 2. Queen Elizabeth II wrote a Python graduate textbook

NEW: A serious staffing shortage — of the Trump admin's own making — is delaying the agency's ability to send billions to universities around the US, leaving labs reeling. “I thought we were at rock bottom”, a senior NIH official said. “We are below rock bottom now.”

Anthropic drops a paper on the US-China AI race They believe the US and its allies may be able to lock in a 12-24 month frontier AI lead by 2028 if they close China’s access to advanced compute and copied model outputs. The report says China is not far behind because Chinese labs are allegedly using loopholes, smuggled chips, offshore data centers, and distillation attacks to stay close to US frontier labs. Anthropic frames compute as the central bottleneck of AI power, saying advanced chips are not just one input but the gatekeeper for training, deployment, revenue, experimentation, and future model improvement. The report says Huawei may produce only 4% of NVIDIA’s aggregate compute in 2026 and 2% in 2027, which is one of the paper’s sharpest claims about China’s semiconductor gap. Anthropic argues that distillation is systematic industrial espionage, because Chinese labs can use American model outputs to copy capabilities without paying the full training cost. The report claims a Chinese AI lead could enable automated repression, stronger cyber operations, faster military AI deployment, and broader authoritarian influence through cheap global AI infrastructure. Future frontier models may become a “country of geniuses in a data center,” meaning a single model cluster could act like a huge expert workforce for cyber, science, engineering, and military research.

📁 Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, says GPT was never just about generating images or text but about generating thought itself. The real shift is that AI is no longer becoming a tool you query occasionally but a system that reasons continuously. Once computers stop waiting for commands and start thinking persistently, every layer of computing and human work gets rebuilt.

Harvard Business Review research reveals that excessive interaction with AI is causing a specific type of mental exhaustion ( or "AI brain fry"), which is particularly hitting high performers who use AI to push past their normal limits. A survey of 1,500 workers reveals that AI is intensifying workloads rather than reducing them, leading to a new form of mental fog. While AI is generally supposed to lighten the load, it often forces users into constant task-switching and intense oversight that actually clutters the mind. This mental static happens because you aren't just doing your job anymore; you are managing multiple digital agents and double-checking their work, which creates a massive cognitive burden. The study found that 14% of full-time workers already feel this fog, with the highest impact seen in technical fields like software development, IT, and finance. High oversight is the biggest culprit, as supervising multiple AI outputs leads to a 12% increase in mental fatigue and a 33% jump in decision fatigue. This isn't just a personal health issue; it directly impacts companies because exhausted employees are 10% more likely to quit. For massive firms worth many B, this decision paralysis can lead to millions of dollars in lost value due to poor choices or total inaction. Essentially, we are working harder to manage our tools than we are to solve the actual problems they were meant to fix. --- hbr .org/2026/03/when-using-ai-leads-to-brain-fry