Sounds a little too much like, "It's not AGI today ergo it will never become AGI"
Does the current AI give productivity benefits to writing code? Probably. Do OpenAI engineers have exclusive access to more capable models that give them a greater productivity boost than others? Also probably.
If one exclusive group gets the benefit of developing AI with a 20% productivity boost compared to others, and they develop a 2.0 that grants them a 25% boost, then a 3.0 with a 30% boost, etc...
The question eventually becomes, "is AGI technically possible"; is there anything special about meat that cannot be reproduced on silicon? We will find AGI someday, and more than likely that discovery will be aided by the current technologies. It's the path here that matters, not the specific iteration of generative LLM tech we happen to be sitting on in May 2025.
> Does the current AI give productivity benefits to writing code? Probably.
> If one exclusive group gets the benefit of developing AI with a 20% productivity boost compared to others, and they develop a 2.0 that grants them a 25% boost, then a 3.0 with a 30% boost, etc...
That’s a bit of a stretch, generative AI is least capable of helping with novel code such as needed to make AGI.
If anything I’d expect companies working on generative AI to be at a significant disadvantage when trying to make AGI because they’re trying to leverage what they are already working on. That’s fine for incremental improvement, but companies rarely ride one wave of technology to the forefront of the next. Analog > digital photography, ICE > EV, coal mining > oil, etc.
The "novel AGI code" probably accounts for <5% of work by time spent. If they can reduce the remaining 95% of grunt work (wiring yet another DB query to a frontend, tweaking the build pipeline, automating GPU allocation scripts) then that means they can focus more on that 5%.
Then it looks like Company A spends 90% of time on novel research work (while LLMs do all the busy work) and Company B spends 5% of time on novel research work.
Just really think about what you just said, sure spend 5% of the time is on the bits nobody on earth has any idea how to accomplish that’s how people will approach this project. Organizationally the grunt work is a trivial rounding error vs the completely unbound we’ve got no idea how to solve this problems bits.
Does the current AI give productivity benefits to writing code? Probably. Do OpenAI engineers have exclusive access to more capable models that give them a greater productivity boost than others? Also probably.
If one exclusive group gets the benefit of developing AI with a 20% productivity boost compared to others, and they develop a 2.0 that grants them a 25% boost, then a 3.0 with a 30% boost, etc...
The question eventually becomes, "is AGI technically possible"; is there anything special about meat that cannot be reproduced on silicon? We will find AGI someday, and more than likely that discovery will be aided by the current technologies. It's the path here that matters, not the specific iteration of generative LLM tech we happen to be sitting on in May 2025.