Gary Marcus：为什么事情终将崩塌
阅读原文· garymarcus.substack.comGary Marcus 把 AI 行业缺乏护城河、价格战、ROI 存疑的经济死结讲得很直白，金融圈越来越认同。虽然观点不新，但这回时机恰好卡在 Google 融资和 Anthropic 取消无限 API 的时候，信号意义很强。
知名人工智能批评者Gary Marcus在其关于可信赖AI的专栏中，探讨了人工智能发展面临的根本性挑战。文章开篇即指向问题的核心，指出相关数学理论的局限性与人类心理的复杂性，是导致AI系统最终可能出现问题的根源。
Part I: The Math
1. Everybody, even Google, seems to be treating AI as if it were some kind of winner take all competition like web search was, in which Google taking over 90%
2. But everybody is building essentially the same technical solution with essentially the same data, so there is no moat.
3. If there is no moat, nobody is going to take 90% of the market.
4. With no clear winners, nobody can charge monopoly prices; instead, you get price wars and commodity pricing.
5. Which means everybody will wind up overpaying compared to the modest profits they will be able to make in an intensely competitive regime.
Am I missing something?
Part II: The Psychology
None of that would matter in the near term if people weren’t noticing.
But they are. Consider:
When I posted the above last night on X, sparked by the jawdropping announcement that Google of all places was raising equity financing , over 750,000 (and counting) viewed the tweet overnight. And what’s more most people agreed, which in that crowd is very rare.
The financial world is taking a lot more notice of my skepticism than it used to. Just yesterday two significant (and excellent) podcasts with me just dropped, a return to the show hosted by the well-known Steve Eisman (played by Steve Carrell in The Big Short): and the other a four-hander with the well-known investor George Noble, the economist Julie Garran and the financial analyst/reporter who is known in the youtube world as @nobodyspecial. Everyone involved in both podcasts share my concerns, and had sharp arguments of their own to add. Garran’s distillation of why the LLM industry will never be commercially viable was crystal clear and compelling.
My critique of tokenmaxxing is getting picked up, too; everybody seems to think that trend is over. And companies like Anthropic are ending their all you can eat buffet, which will make many customers think twice.
Still more reports have coming out questioning the RoI for corporate customers. Bain’s conclusions yesterday almost perfectly the old definition of insanity that I keep quoting (doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results):
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Timing when all this might fall apart is hard, but the economics don’t make sense, and more and more people are starting to notice.
What is most upsetting though, is how retail investors and retirement funds are likely to be taken advantage of in all of this.
Same will happen with Anthropic and OpenAI. All of which led me to this prediction yesterday:
I seriously hope that I am wrong about this. But I doubt it.
To close, here’s one more economist, reaching basically the same conclusions; I leave the last words with him:
The technology is powerful but unreliable. It must be boxed into narrow, supervised uses. The economics of inference are unforgiving. The competitive environment is crowded, with open models and vertically integrated hyperscalers eroding any pricing power that an independent lab might hope to have.
What is the plausible, well‑specified path by which Anthropic or OpenAI grow into the kind of durable, high‑margin franchises that would justify the valuations their private rounds have implied?
There is none visible.