Why I don’t think AGI is right around the corner

Okay. This is a narration of a blog post I wrote on 06/03/2025 titled, Why I don't think AGI is right around the corner. Quote, Things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could. Rutiger Dornbusch. I've had a lot of discussions on my podcast where we haggle out our timelines to AGI. Some guests think it's twenty years away, others two years. Here's where my thoughts lie as of June 2025. Continue learning. Sometimes people say that even if all AI progress totally stopped, the systems of today would still be far more economically trans

Even if AI progress totally stalls, you think that the models are really spiky and they don't have general intelligence. It's so economically valuable and sufficiently easy to collect data Yes. On all of these different jobs, these white collar job tasks, such that to Sholto's point, we will we should expect to see them automated within the next five years.

If AI progress totally stalls today, I think less than 25% of white collar employment goes away. Sure, many tasks will get automated. Claude for Opus can technically rewrite auto generated transcripts for me. But since it's not possible for me to have it improve over time and learn my preferences, I still hire a human for this. Even if we get more data, without progress and continual learning, I think that we will be in a substantially similar position with all of white collar work. Yes. Technically, AIs might be able to perform a lot of subtasks somewhat satisfactorily, but their inability to