To use an analogy, it's a car but not a self-driving one -- it augments my natural ability to super-human levels; but it's not autonomous, I still have to steer it quite a lot or else it'll run into oncoming traffic. So like a Tesla.
And like you I don't see how to get there from where we are. I think we're at a local maxima here.
To continue the car analogy - are you really suggesting we're at 'peak car'? You don't believe that cars in 20 years time are going to be significantly better than the cars we have today? That's very pessimistic.
There was a meme from back when - "if cars advanced like computers we'd be getting 1000 miles per gallon by now".
Thinking back to the car I had 20 years ago, it's not all that different from the car I have now.
Yes, the car I have now has a HUD, Carplay, Wireless iPhone charging, an iPhone app, adaptive cruise control, and can act as a wifi hotspot. But fundamentally it still does the same thing in the same way as 20 years ago. Even if we allow for EVs and Hybrid cars, it's still all mostly the same. Prius came out in 2000.
And now we've reached the point where computers advance like cars. We're writing code in the same languages, the same OS, the same instruction set, for the same chips as we did 20 years ago. Yes, we have new advancements like Rust, and new OSes like Android and iOS, and chipsets like ARM are big now. But iPhone/iPad/iMac, c/C++/Swift, OSX/MacOS/iOS, PowerPC/Intel/ARM.... fundamentally it's all homeomorphic - the same thing in different shapes. You take a programmer from the 70s and they will not be so out of place today. I feel like I'm channeling Bret Victor here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbHZNRda08o
And that's not for lack of advancements in languages, Os, instruction sets, and hardware architectures, it's for a lack of investment and commercialization. I can get infinite money right now to make another bullshit AI app, but no one wants to invest in an OS play. You'll hear 10000 excuses about how MS this and Linux that and it's not practical and impossible and there's no money in it, so on and so forth. The network effects are too high, and the in-group dynamic of keeping things the way they are is too strong.
But AGI? Now that's something investors find totally rational and logical and right around the corner. "I will make a fleet of robot taxis that can drive themselves with a camera" will get you access to unlimited wallets filled with endless cash. "I will advance operating systems past where they have been languishing for 40 years" is tumbleweeds.
The cars we have today are not so far off from the cars of 100 years ago. So yes, I highly doubt another 20 years of development, after all the low hanging fruit has already been picked, will see much change at all.
"after all the low hanging fruit has already been picked"
Another great analogy. LLMs allow us to pick low hanging fruit faster. If we want to pick the higher fruit, we'll need fundamentally different equipment, not automated ways to pick low hanging fruit.
For what its worth I agree quite strongly with you and moron4hire in this thread
I wanted to make an observation that what you two are describing seems to me like it maps onto the Pareto principle quite neatly
LLMs seem like they have rapidly (maybe exponentially) approached the 80% effectiveness threshold, but the last 20% is going to be a much higher bar to clear
I think a lot of the disagreement around how useful these tools are is based around this. You can tell which people are happy with 80% accuracy versus those with higher standards
And like you I don't see how to get there from where we are. I think we're at a local maxima here.
To continue the car analogy - are you really suggesting we're at 'peak car'? You don't believe that cars in 20 years time are going to be significantly better than the cars we have today? That's very pessimistic.