Houston: we have a slop problem. This is a problem at every scale. Even inside our company we see we can produce lots of things, but can't v…

Houston: we have a slop problem. This is a problem at every scale. Even inside our company we see we can produce lots of things, but can't verify those things are correct/useful. And looking to use agents to verify makes the problem worse. Verification is the bottleneck. We can't trust that the agent actually did the correct thing. We all want to rush to say AGI or SI is here. But this is a real problem. Where the human can choose or verify the output, AI is a game changer. But when the output becomes too much or too broad to verify, you end up with a heap of slop. This is what's happening to math proofs. And what happens with an open ended task in a company. Terence Tao warns that the race to AGI is becoming toxic, and OpenAI’s massive paper dump wiped out junior research projects overnight. Some parts of his most recent interview: “They were willing to toss understanding to the side so that they could prove more theorems, get more p…

Source: Gary Marcus (X) | 2026-10-16