I think the biggest case for a bearish attitude towards AGI is simply that we don't take advantage of the intelligence we already have. Look at our elected human leaders, for Pete's sake.
If we had access to AGI today, we'd just find novel and interesting ways to ignore it, enslave it, gimp it, and/or bias it.
What, your preference would be to just unleash it upon the world? I wish the average software engineer had any foundation whatsoever in humanities and philosophy before being allowed to make such decisions, but alas, we are doomed.
Look at how the feudal tech lords employ the tech we actually have, do you seriously think they suddenly grow a conscience if the mythical AGI came to pass? All observable behavior will be based on insatiable greed for money and power, just as it is now.
The last major advancement was probably GPT3, af least if we are talking about the LLM companies, the ones involved in the current data center boom.
After that was we experienced were marginal improvements of the same technology. Yes, the current models are better than what OpenAI put out at the time of ChatGPT 3, but none of it was revolutionary (and the gains have been less and less perceptible in newer versions).
We might be as far from AGI as we were in 2022. I think we are multiple revolutions in technology away from it.
I think agentic models will prove to be a seismic revolution by themselves, AGI or no AGI.
The models themselves may not need to be that much smarter than what we have now. You can make up for a lack of IQ to some extent if you wrap a control loop around a relentless machine.
That's the thing, we got into hypotheticals. Maybe you are right, maybe not.
There were people that dismissed the Internet as a fad. There were people that dismissed Cryptocurrency as a fad. There were people that dismissed NFTs as a fad.
I think LLMs are very useful in some contexts, somewhat useless in others, and I think agentic models are highly overrated. Too unreliable to be left by themselves. We are a few revolutions away from that changing, I think.
But that, too his hypothetical. What I didn't do is call you a fool for your hypothesis.
Gotta love this argument. Top it off by saying anyone skeptical is a fool, because of course.