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.
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 like to play a game whenever I meet a new group of programmers/lawyers/board gamers/pedants. I ask them to define a sandwich, then I point out all of the edge cases until we get to the point where I can either say their definition is bad because it e.g. doesn't include subs (short for submarine sandwiches), or I can say that poptarts are sandwiches.
The problem is that reality is blurry and clear definitions are fundamentally incapable of capturing the nuance there.
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.
Doing automated driving right means restructuring our entire surface transportation system to support it. I doubt it can happen without a serious commitment from government... which is in no condition to commit to anything.
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.