It doesn't mean everything you can think of is possible.
People who say every jobs will be automated never held any tool more advanced than a screwdriver and never worked a single day outside of an air conditioned office.
They were predicting flying cars for "the year 2000"...
But enough jobs are going to be automated that it will cause social and economic chaos, and political breakdown. Sure AI can't attach an air conditioning unit outside my window nor use a plunger on my toilet but it can still replace lawyers, secretaries, software devs, and many more jobs.
Taxis were supposed to be all replaced when Uber promised to buy every single Tesla model S coming out of factories from 2020,they're not even self driving today...
Software engineers were supposed to disappear "in 6 months" every 6 months since chat gpt was released
Lots of people on this website live in insane bubbles which are completely out of sync with the reality of most workers
No one rational ever said software engineers were going to be replaced in 6 months. Some people said AI will automate 90% of coding in 6 months and they were not far off (and accurate in some contexts, e.g. startups).
Coding has been automated since the very beginning of coding.
The first two programming languages (Fortran and Cobol) were supposed to make coding obsolete because non-coders will now just make software with natural language prompts.
LLMs are a dangerous tool for coding because they are infinite technical debt generators. Ideally only experienced senior developers should be allowed to use them.
They'll only get to claim a hollow victory because AGI is impossible to rigorously define. None of the regulating bodies of consumer products will be able to define it better than academics. They'll use marketing to make those claims and there will be legal battles that keep it in a gray area.
They'll go for that because it's easier than actually inventing the 'sci-fi' AGI, shareholders keep making money, and it keeps them getting paid to keep going. If any of them actually do succeed, then that little deception will be peanuts.
Demis' bar is high and he stated clearly multiple times: AGI should be capable of inventing truly novel things. Examples he gave included the Theory of General Relativity and the game of Go.
Anthropic's latest model also solved this 80-year-old problem that eluded many expert mathematicians, in a different way, according to one of its employees.
Quite frustrating to see all these cynical, borderline-irrational comments on HN. Maybe I should do what pg and other ex-HN contributors have done--avoid taking part in the discussions here.
The level of discourse here has dropped so much.
At least I should stop replying to people hiding under throwaway accounts.
The people saying "it's just a stochastic parrot" were saying that because they thought the fact that it works by modelling the statistics of words and predicting the next most likely one meant that it would never be capable of anything sophisticated or any kind of novel output. It was just parroting things that already existed in a random way.
There was never any actual foundation for that belief, and it has been proven wrong empirically by more capable models, which is why you don't hear people saying it much any more.