Interesting that in an article entitled "Why I'm betting against AGI hype", the author doesn't actually say what bet he is making - i.e. what specific decisions is he making, based on his prediction that AGI is much less likely to arise from LLMs than the probability the market is implicitly pricing in suggests. What assets is he investing in or shorting? What life decisions is he making differently than he otherwise would?
I say this not because I think his prediction as stated here is necessarily wrong or unreasonable, but because I myself might want to make investment decisions based upon this prediction, and translating a prediction about the future into the correct executions today is not trivial.
Without addressing his argument about AGI-from-LLMs - because I don't have any better information myself than listening to Sutskever on Dwarkesh's podcast - I am somewhat skeptical that the current market price of AI-related assets is actually pricing in a "60-80%" chance of AGI from LLMs specifically, rather than all the useful applications of LLMs that are not AGI. But this isn't a prediction I'm very confident in myself.
Armchair commentary.
> I’ve listened to the optimists—the researchers and executives claiming [...]
Actually researchers close to the problem are the first ones to give farther out target dates. And Yann LeCun is very vocal about LLMs being a dead end.