The dream that LLM AIs might lead to AGI seems finally to be over. The idea's supporters said that with enough training and computation, independent reasoning would arise in LLMs. It never has. This week, OpenAI, the company that seeks a $500 billion stock market valuation, finally burst the bubble. It's long-awaited Chat-GPT 5, touted as 'near AGI', still makes all the basic errors in math and logic that an average 10-year-old wouldn't. Even Chain-of-Thought Reasoning, hoped by some to be an intermediary step, is a failure, too.
But LLM AIs aren't useless - in fact, the opposite. They've delivered Level 4 self-driving, are advancing general-purpose robotics, and excel at a wide variety of brain-work, even without AGI. That is enough to make them economically transformative.
But the US stock market seems bored with that. Instead, investors wanted to chase the possibility of a 'unicorn' - getting in early on a company that would achieve AGI, dominate like the other Big Tech giants, and earn trillions. That isn't going to happen any time soon.
China's economic system seems better at being pragmatic about AI. Most of their efforts seem geared towards useful real-world uses for AI, and much less about AGI. AGI will no doubt happen one day - who knows when? It will probably need fundamental breakthroughs developed by humans. Meanwhile, the real 2020s AI revolution is integrating AI into everyday life, not AGI.
A familiar 2020s story seems to be playing out here. The Chinese system of state capitalism seems to have grasped what matters when it comes to meaningful economic success, while the western system, driven by the super-rich becoming ever richer, seems bloated, inefficient, and unable to allocate capital & investment to what matters for society.