There are plenty of jobs that have already been pretty much replaced by AI: certain forms of journalism, low-end photoshop work, logo generation, copywriting. What does the OP need to see in order to believe that AI has "joined the workforce"?
> We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies...
"materially change the output of companies" seems fairly defined and didn't happen in most cases. I guess some kicked out more slop but I don't think that's what he meant.
I think the mistake here is expecting that AI is just making workers in older jobs faster, when the reality is, more often than not, that it changes the nature of the task itself.
Whenever AI reached the "good enough" point, it doesn't do so in a way that nicely aligns with human abilities, quite the opposite, it might be worse at performing a task, but be able to perform it 1000x faster. That allows you to do things that weren't previously possible, but it also means that professionals might not want to rely on using AI for the old tasks.
A professional translator isn't going to switch over to using AI, the quality isn't there yet, but somebody like Amazon could offer a "OCR & translate all the books" service and AI would be good enough for it, since it could handle all the books that nobody has the time and money to translate manually. Which in turn will eventually put the professional translator out of a job when it gets better than good enough. We aren't quite there yet, but getting pretty close.
In 2025 a lot of AI went from "useless, but promising" to "good enough".