Prediction: In the next twelve months, changes to LLMs that allow them to interact in more ways, such as:

1. Voice interaction

2. Anthropic’s artifacts

3. Agents

4. Reading webpages

5. Spreadsheet use

Etc.

Will be much more important to the perception of LLM power and usefulness than increases in their intellectual capability.

It will also restructure the way people think about LLM’s- it’s harder to think of something as a next-word generator when it acts in a more extensive sense. That seems to be the way human prejudice about this stuff works (see 4E stuff, which seems to me to reflect these prejudices).

LLM’s are already ‘smart’ enough to do most stuff the average office worker wants to accomplish with a computer. I’ve been an office worker- most of this stuff ain’t hard! But without the capacity to control said computer, talk, etc. LLM’s are ‘stuck’.

This is not to say that further intellectual growth isn’t important- it’s far more important in the long run. Right now though, the major bottleneck to public reception and commercial deployment is available modes of interaction with computers and their users.