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See, that's where the disagreement lies. Subtly (or maybe not so subtly) the discussion has changed from "AI will achieve AGI and then ASI and then run the world to give us fully automated luxury gay space communism" to "AI is for coding, it's all about the coding, AI will replace software engineers, coding is the be-all and end-all, ignore that it still fakes answers to questions where people know enough to know it's lying/hallucinating".
I don't care about coding because coding has nothing to do with my job. Can it replace accountants, lawyers, clerical staff? Without inventing fake precedents or fake citations from dead authors?
"Oh, but look at the shiny coding!"
Yes, great, wonderful. Now we have better models that can create vast oceans of slop to grab those SEO high rankings to sell more advertising. Yippee!
If AI sticks only to coding and produces genuinely useful things, wonderful, we'll all be happy. Is it going to do that, or just "now we can fire two-thirds of our workforce and get it to produce more clickbait headlines and ads"?
I'm of the impression that the emphasis on coding is so that each new generation can take a larger share of designing and implementing the next, until such time only the AI is writing the AI. And that's how we reach AGI as quickly as possible, if such a thing is possible via LLMs.
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Don't waste my time with a strawman, please.
I expect AGI and ASI. Even before LLMs, when it was Yudkowsky and Friends worrying about hypothetical future AI in a shed in the ancient times of the early 2000s, the concern was recursive self-improvement. What does that mean? A smart-enough AI writing the code for a smarter version of itself, which writes the code for an even smarter version of itself, and so on till humans are left in the dust.
Notice the common thread? Coding, writing code. Even leaving aside that there's enormous consumer and business demand for LLM-written code, their coding capabilities have been central to this whole debate since day -1.
The big labs are betting their future on being the first to get to this point, and already claim significant boosts to the productivity of their human researchers via the models writing code for training new models, or even conducting experiments.
Why don't you buy a $20 plan and test? I can tell you that as a doctor who isn't expected to write code ever, it could do most of my work for me, and well. The only reason I haven't automated myself into an early retirement are the obvious physical bottlenecks and NHS IT.
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This is totally not the point. The point of this challenge is for us to post easy or at least pretty doable stuff for humans, and watch AI crash and burn. Then we point and laugh at the AI.
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