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Notes -
First, points of presumed agreement: LLMs have significant gaps. My personal bugbear is sample efficiency. And I agree that claims that everyone (at least white collar workers, even those who aren't protected by regulation or custom) is going to be out of a job by 2030 are overblown. Intelligence is valuable, and human intelligence will remain valuable in the short term, even if LLM intelligence substitutes; there's simply not enough compute right now or in the pipeline to drop agents into every single white collar job. Even if there were, the methods used for gathering datasets for the shining stars of current LLMs (math; programming) don't naturally extend to other roles.
The massive short term threat, though, is RSI. Math and programming don't substitute for the majority of human skills, but they do substitute for ML researchers. Maybe more a bunch of bright grad students stumbling around in the dark than visionary geniuses, but grad student descent got us to where we are today. Throw a thousand, or ten thousand, or a million of them at the current bottlenecks in ML (IMO sample efficiency, but take your pick), and it seems quite likely to me they could open them, today. LLMs' flaws compared to the human brain are an algorithmic, not hardware, issue. That's the point here I'm least certain about, but if it's true, the training data and even compute bottlenecks themselves become much weaker constraints. A couple examples could become enough to train the AI to replace a role, and the compute needed to do it would drop even faster than it already is. Stronger agency may itself arise by itself from this. Robotics will be substantially slower (physical world and all, and the demand for capital to build robot factories will have to compete with other massive demands for capital), but still moving much faster than today.
It will make for an incredibly chaotic time, with lots of angry people. And AIs will be rapidly insinuating themselves into the economy, toward an end state of a time of wonders and complete human dependency on AI goodwill (a process that will take more like two decades than two years, but still incredibly fast in the grand scheme of things). Bad enough IMO, though I understand the appeal. But to people who see this as appealing: we have no idea of what the actual shape of the AIs that will arise from this process will be, and I don't want to bet the future on a gamble that they'll be in a friendly shape willing to care for their dependents indefinitely.
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