The most interesting part of this article isn’t its assertion that AI innovation is about to slow, but rather that current LLMs can only produce “so-so automati

The most interesting part of this article isn’t its assertion that AI innovation is about to slow, but rather that current LLMs can only produce “so-so automation” — that although LLMs can replace many jobs, LLMs aren’t good enough to offset the cost of people losing such jobs. True as of today, but the article is overlooking multi-modal LLMs. Once AI can see, we’ll go from “wow, GPT4 is pretty good at helping me to my job” to “uh oh, GPT4-Vision can do my job better than I can”. This is especially true if the model can read text off a screen. At that point, it’s likely to replace many workers who stare at screens for a few hours a day and pretend to work the remainder. The model won’t take coffee breaks, or long lunches, or take the afternoon off to drive their kid to the dentist. If you’re a worker whose work depends upon looking at a screen, and mostly involves moving data from one place to another with light transformations and interpretations, you’re going to be in trouble by the end of the decade.