This is why research like this is important and needs to keep being published.

What we have seen the last few years is a conscious marketing effort to rebrand everything ML as AI and to use terms like "Reasoning", "Extended Thinking" and others that for many non technical people give the impression that it is doing far more than it is actually doing.

Many of us here can see his research and be like... well yeah we already knew this. But there is a very well funded effort to oversell what these systems can actually do and that is reaching the people that ultimately make the decisions at companies.

So the question is no longer will AI Agents be able to do most white collar work. They can probably fake it well enough to accomplish a few tasks and management will see that. But will the output actually be valuable long term vs short term gains.

The scary thing about ML isn’t that it’s poised to eat a lot of lower-reasoning tasks, it’s that we’re going to find ourselves in a landscape of “that’s just what the AI said to do” kind of excuses for all kinds of bad behavior, and we’re completely unwilling to explore what biases are encoded in the models we’re producing. It’s like how Facebook abdicates responsibility for how users feel because it’s just the product of an algorithm. And if I were a betting person I’d bet all this stuff is going to be used for making rental determinations and for deciding who gets exceptions to overdraft fees well before it’s used for anything else. It’s an enabling technology for all kinds of inhumanity.