> Do we still think we'll have soft take off?

There's still no evidence we'll have any take off. At least in the "Foom!" sense of LLMs independently improving themselves iteratively to substantial new levels being reliably sustained over many generations.

To be clear, I think LLMs are valuable and will continue to significantly improve. But self-sustaining runaway positive feedback loops delivering exponential improvements resulting in leaps of tangible, real-world utility is a substantially different hypothesis. All the impressive and rapid achievements in LLMs to date can still be true while major elements required for Foom-ish exponential take-off are still missing.