I find it utterly fantastical and downright outlandish that so many (supposedly "very smart") people could believe for so long that simply throwing an enormous amount of data at an enormous amount of compute -without ever doing the actual hard work of, you know, writing very smart code in the first place - would make some kind of intelligence spontaneously appear.

It seems so counter-intuitive!

Intellectual laziness, magical thinking, group-think, a misplaced - almost religious - fascination with new technologies, and investor-driven, feverish FOMO do indeed come to mind as possible explanations.

On the hardware side of the equation (GPUs and datacenters), we are talking about a misallocation of capital on a civilizational scale.

And the fever still hasn't broken; just ask Zuckerberg.

Understanding and explaining how we got here might be as rewarding for future human societies as doing the actual hard work of using our brains and our modern tools to effectively build some kind of artificial intelligence.

Keep up the good work, Gary Marcus, and thank you!