> It's Gary Marcus "neural networks don't really work" suddenly discovering they do, and literally trying to shut down research in that area while keeping his prefered research areas funded
Gary Marcus has been aware that neural nets work for a while now, but he is only in the spotlight for his contrarian take, if he stops having a contrarian take he disappears, because it's not like he is producing any research worth of discussion otherwise. So you can expect him to stay contrarian forever. What might have been a genuine take initially is now his job, that's how he makes money, and it's so associated with him that it's probably his identity as well.
This is a depressing pattern that I've seen get repeated over and over: it's easy to become Twitter-famous by just shitting out a steady stream of contrarian "me against the world, I'm the rogue dissident nobody wants to talk about!" takes, and once you start doing this, you have no choice but to keep it up forever (even when the takes are just wrong) because it has become your identity. It has destroyed so many interesting and intelligent people, and by itself is reason enough to never use Twitter.
Adopting a contrarian brand because it brings you attention when you'd otherwise be a nobody is by far not limited to twitter. It's a mainstay of traditional journalism.
If anything twitter disincentivizes the practice because it has commoditized cynicism: It's harder to build a brand by being the well known naysayer of X when someone can source whatever negative view they want by simply typing it into a search box.
Commoditization will be complete once the media starts quoting GPT4 for reliably opposing views.
"Neural networks don't really work" isn't an accurate representation of Marcus' position, and his actual position hasn't been shown to be wrong unless you believe that LLMs and diffusion models display, or are manifestly on the way towards displaying, understanding. That is something many think, and it's not in itself an unreasonable view. However there are also plenty of reasons to think otherwise and many, including me, who haven't conceded the point. It hasn't been settled beyond reasonable debate.
To assume that the person you disagree with can only hold their view out of cynical self-interest, wishful thinking or plain insanity is to assume that you are so obviously right that there can be no valid debate. That is a bad starting position and I'd recommend against it as a matter of principle. Apart from anything else, however convinced you are of your own rightness it's plain rude to assume everyone else is equally convinced, and ad-hominem to ascribe negative motives to those who disagree.
As for Gary Marcus, as far as I've seen he's been consistent in his views and respectful in the way he's argued them. To read about him on HN you'd think he's spent the last few years badmouthing every AI researcher around, but I haven't seen that, just disagreement with people's statements - i.e. healthy debate. I haven't followed him closely though, so if you know of any cases where he's gone beyond that and said the sorts of things about AI researchers that people routinely say about him I'd interested to see them.
Gary Marcus has been aware that neural nets work for a while now, but he is only in the spotlight for his contrarian take, if he stops having a contrarian take he disappears, because it's not like he is producing any research worth of discussion otherwise. So you can expect him to stay contrarian forever. What might have been a genuine take initially is now his job, that's how he makes money, and it's so associated with him that it's probably his identity as well.