It's increasingly looking naive to assume scaling LLMs is all you need to get to full white-collar worker replacement. The attention mechanism / hopfield network is fundamentally modeling only a small subset of the full human brain, and all the increasing sustained hype around bolted-on solutions for "agentic memory" is, in my opinion, glaring evidence that these SOTA transformers alone aren't sufficient even when you just limit the space to text. Maybe I'm just parroting Yann LeCun.
You probably are.
The "small subset" argument is profoundly unconvincing, and inconsistent with both neurobiology of the human brain and the actual performance of LLMs.
The transformer architecture is incredibly universal and highly expressive. Transformers power LLMs, video generator models, audio generator models, SLAM models, entire VLAs and more. It not a 1:1 copy of human brain, but that doesn't mean that it's incapable of reaching functional equivalence. Human brain isn't the only way to implement general intelligence - just the one that was the easiest for evolution to put together out of what it had.
LeCun's arguments about "LLMs can't do X" keep being proven wrong empirically. Even on ARC-AGI-3, which is a benchmark specifically designed to be adversarial to LLMs and target the weakest capabilities of off the shelf LLMs, there is no AI class that beats LLMs.
> you just limit the space to text
And even then... why can't they write a novel? Or lowering the bar, let's say a novella like Death in Venice, Candide, The Metamorphosis, Breakfast at Tiffany's...?
Every book's in the training corpus...
Is it just a matter of someone not having spent a hundred grand in tokens to do it?