Comment by skybrian
2 hours ago
Superhuman performance at chess probably would have blown people’s minds in the 1950’s. We’ve since learned that sometimes intelligence can be narrow and sometimes it can be spiky, even if you can have a decent conversation.
It’s hard to point to anything and say it’s impossible. AGI doesn’t break any laws of physics. But some things like driverless cars can still be a long slog to get to widespread deployment.
Waymo is the only self driving car that works well enough to even try widespread deployment with pricing that isn't going to be an operating cash flow disaster. But they're going to have to at least double their footprint to put a meaningful dent in the billion dollars a year Waymo spends on R&D.
Waymo isn't LLM powered. Everyone who thought LLMs would make Waymo Driver obsolete were wrong. In part because Waymo can't be spiky. In part because practical applications of AI require a lot of time and effort.
I am amazed at how usable and useful coding agents have become since they were a hot mess about a year ago. I would not be at all amazed if there are only one or two other use cases that have the same favorable evolutionary trajectory.