Usage frequency
How often do people chat with a LLM? This is not a large sample and not randomly sampled but it gives some order of magnitude. The metric is chat threads per week.
Myself as an AGI enthusiast - 27
A friend and AGI enthusiast - 7
My wife - 4
A manager acquaintance - 5
Takeoff
I have always assumed that singularity takeoff after human level AGI would be fairly fast. But, partly from the above and partly from Sam Altman's comments, even though we are not yet at human level AGI, I am beginning to suspect that adoption both by people and businesses may be slower than one might think. People (and businesses) change slowly.
Computers can think
After following the AI field for decades and thinking about the problem I really don't even like to engage in conversations with "deniers" - people who think computers can't think like humans. According to ChatGPT:
Copernicus published "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" in 1543. It took over a century for the heliocentric model to gain broad acceptance. Darwin published "On the Origin of Species" in 1859. The scientific community largely accepted evolution by the end of the 19th century, although the mechanism of natural selection took longer to be universally accepted."
Computer *can* think, much the way humans do but in a slightly different flavor using different hardware. Not only can they think, they will soon think much better than humans.