While I don't disagree 100%, my question to you is:
who/what says this is the case/why? GPT-3.5 was released/made popular "to the masses" not too long ago. Where do you feel the pressure for a quantum leap "quickly" is coming from?
> That’s true for AI, but it is not the right way to think about AGI. For AGI, the bet is that someone will build an AI capable enough to automate AI development. Once we get there it will pay for itself. The question is what the cost-speed tradeoff to get there looks like.
I don't think people are treating AI as a typical investment. They are valuing it as a potential replacement for like 95% of human workers. Once the plateau becomes obvious to even the biggest fanatics, people are going to realize all this money has been used to create really good chatbots that just make shit up 25% of the time. The whole sales pitch for the last 1-2 years has been that AGI is "just around the corner" and we can get there via the magic of exponential growth.
See also standardization of EV battery form factors -- a problem that, had it been tackled by government several years ago, would have avoided the chicken-and-egg problem that is impeding adoption now.
It's entirely possible we could see an AGI develop within a specific medium, e.g. text-only to start.
But also, don't you think those two problems are convergent? If we make an algorithm smart enough to drive a car anywhere more safely than a human would, it seems likely to me that that will either be AGI or right on the cusp of it.
I am pretty sure that's less than half the sales pitch. Current LLMs are economically valuable, they are useful to all kinds of knowledge work, despite their flaws.
