Politico

If entrepreneur and researcher Gary Marcus is known for anything, it’s for his fierce critique of the burgeoning industry around generative AI.

Marcus has played a major role in informing Washington’s thinking on AI, speaking to the Senate Judiciary Committee alongside OpenAI’s Sam Altman in 2023 about why, in his words, “we are… facing a perfect storm, of corporate irresponsibility, widespread deployment, lack of adequate regulation and inherent unreliability” around AI. In POLITICO Magazine he subsequently offered his own menu of big ideas for how Congress sholud tackle a full range of AI concerns.

His new book “Taming Silicon Valley,” publishing next week by the MIT Press, is a sweeping polemic about how, he says, Big Tech will run roughshod over consumers and American democracy itself absent regulatory intervention. Earlier this week Marcus and I discussed why he approached the book with such urgency, and his vision of an American populace who understands the technology well enough to know when it’s being misused. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows: