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- OpenAI's head of Codex says human typing speed is limiting progress toward AGI.
- Alexander Embiricos said that's because humans rely on writing prompts to review AI's work.
- He said progress will be made when AI agents can review work instead of humans.
Just. Type. Faster.
If you needed a sign for how determined AI-land is to achieve AGI quickly, it's that one of its leaders sees the speed of human typing as one of its biggest roadblocks.
Alexander Embiricos, who leads product development for Codex, OpenAI's coding agent, said on "Lenny's Podcast" on Sunday that the "current underappreciated limiting factor" to AGI is "human typing speed" or "human multi-tasking speed on writing prompts."
AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a still theoretical version of AI that reasons as well or better than humans. It's the thing all the big AI companies are competing to be the first to realize.
"You can have an agent watch all the work you're doing, but if you don't have the agent also validating its work, then you're still bottlenecked on, like, can you go review all that code?" Embiricos said.
Embiricos' view is that we need to unburden humans from having to write prompts and validate AI's work, since we aren't fast enough.
"If we can rebuild systems to let the agent be default useful, we'll start unlocking hockey sticks," he said.
"Hockey stick growth" is a term used to describe a growth curve that starts out flat and suddenly spikes, mirroring the shape of a hockey stick.
Embiricos said there's no simple path to a fully automated workflow — each use case will require its own approach — but he expects to see progress toward this level of growth soon.
"Starting next year, we're going to see early adopters starting to hockey stick their productivity, and then over the years that follow, we're going to see larger and larger companies hockey stick that productivity," he said.
Somewhere in between the time early adopters start to see gains in productivity and when tech giants manage to fully automate processes with AI agents is when we'll see AGI, Embiricos said.
"That hockey-sticking will be flowing back into the AI labs, and that's when we'll basically be at the AGI," he said.
