Yes I think the drug discovery analogy is apt. I've spent a bunch of time playing with evolutionary algorithms, they're great fun. And when they work they can do surprising things! [edit] I think the drug discovery analogy does have some limits though. Drug discovery isn't a blind search through fitness space, it's informed by physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine. We have many guiding lights to illuminate the space and identify regions (still high-dimensional infinite regions!) that are likely to be productive. There are fewer lights to guide the way on a search for fitness in intelligence. Hell, we don't even know how to write down a decent objective function.

I wouldn't bet on evolving an intelligent, sentient being-in-a-box on a computer any time soon though. I'm of course prepared to be pleasantly surprised.

That said, I think it's pretty clear that LLMs are not going to get us there.

I don’t think people are arguing to stop researching AGI. Moreso against sales people trying to use the concept of AGI to sell products that are very much not AGI. Or devoting so many of our resources into such a pursuit that it causes harm to real people.

This is obviously complicated by the fact that LLMs/Agents are useful by themselves, but that’s not really the topic at hand.

The parent poster argument boils down to "[something] is theoretically possible, therefore 1) it is guaranteed to practically implementable 2) in the reasonably near future". Both are simply prima facie false; one can ask an LLM to explain why if there's any doubt.

And now we’re desperately trying to ”upgrade” penicillin (and friends) because it doesn’t work any more in many cases. Do you think we can repeat the process or do we need something completely different?

This is why biological comparisons are weak, we talk about a few agents verifying and checking LLMs, meanwhile the world consists of almost an infinite number of the same, just operating on different time scales. I agree that with we don’t know the timescale, and we definitely don’t know if long term it will continue to work ”adding more of the same”. Throwing more penicillin at the problem sure as hell didn’t, but it looked great initially. And I’m obviously not arguing the human benefits of penicillin, just that what we thought would work forever quickly didn’t.