Take this stuff with a HUGE grain of salt. A lot of goofy hyperbolic people work in AI (any startup, really).
We overestimate the short term progress, but underestimate the medium, long term one.
For one where the pessimist consensus has already folded, see: coherent image/movie generation and multi-modality. There were loads of pessimists calling people idiots for believing in the possibility. Then it happened. Turns out an image really is worth 16x16 words.
Pessimism isn't insight. There is no substitute for the hard work of "try and see."
And it _could_ be just one clever breakthrough away, and that could happen tomorrow, or it could be centuries away. There's no way to know.
It was the expectation of many people in the field in the 1980s, too
they think this because it serves their interests of attracting an enormous amount of attention and money to an industry that they seek to make millions of dollars personally from.
My money is well on environmental/ climate collapse wiping out most of humanity in the next 50-100 years, hundreds of years before anything like an AGI possibly could.
I don’t know if you’re conflating capability with consciousness but frankly it doesn’t matter if the thing knows it’s alive if it still makes everyone obsolete.
LLMs are a super impressive advancement, like calculators for text, but if you want to force the discussion into a grandiose context then they're easy to dismiss. Sure, their outputs appear remarkably coherent through sheer brute force, but at the end of the day their fundamental nature makes them unsuitable for any task where precision is necessary. Even as just a chatbot, the facade breaks down with a bit of poking and prodding or just unlucky RNG. Only threat LLMs present is the risk that people will introduce their outputs into safety critical systems.
