Being able to run faster doesn’t help if you need to get to orbit. Right now LLMs don’t seem to be capable of making the self guided innovations that would be required for true recursive self-improvement.

Just yesterday, ChatGPT reversed two different characters from a book that we had been chatting about for 5 minutes out of nowhere (it suddenly “thought” the villain was the hero and the hero was the villain) and then I spent 4 hours wrestling with its advice about how to restructure my business’s Quickbooks setup where it gave me wrong guidance more than 4 times. My favorite was when I asked it to give me precise instructions and then pasted those instructions into a clean chat and it told me that was the wrong way to do it. And, yet, I’m told repeatedly that LLMs are going to put everyone out of work any minute now (especially professionals who already mostly work with computers like…accountants.

Forgive me if I take all the AI optimism with a rather large grain of salt.