It's silly to say that the only objective that will vindicate AI investments is AGI.
Current batch of deep learning models are fundamentally a technology for labor automation. This is immensely useful in itself, without the need to do AGI. The Sora2 capabilities are absolutely wild (see a great example here of what non-professional users are already able to create with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXp8_w3XzgU )
So only looking at video capabilities, or at coding capabilities, it's already ready to automate and upend industries worth trillions in the long run.
The emerging reasoning capabilities are very promising, able to generate new theories and make scientific experiments in easy to test fields, such as in vitro drug creation. It doesn't matter if the LLM hallucinates 90% of the time, if it correctly reasons a single time and it can create even a single new cancer drug that passes the test.
These are all examples of massive, massive economic disruption by automating intellectual labor, that don't require strict AGI capabilities.
Current batch of deep learning models are fundamentally a technology for labor automation. This is immensely useful in itself, without the need to do AGI. The Sora2 capabilities are absolutely wild (see a great example here of what non-professional users are already able to create with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXp8_w3XzgU )
So only looking at video capabilities, or at coding capabilities, it's already ready to automate and upend industries worth trillions in the long run.
The emerging reasoning capabilities are very promising, able to generate new theories and make scientific experiments in easy to test fields, such as in vitro drug creation. It doesn't matter if the LLM hallucinates 90% of the time, if it correctly reasons a single time and it can create even a single new cancer drug that passes the test.
These are all examples of massive, massive economic disruption by automating intellectual labor, that don't require strict AGI capabilities.