I don’t believe there is any fundamental reason LLMs can’t do this task, and the base models are probably already capable of it. RL to elicit the right behavior just hasn’t been done yet. Coding got solved first because it was cheaper and easier to get the necessary data for RL environments, which made it the natural first market opportunity. Solving white collar communication will require more resources to collect the data and build the environments, but the labs now have more resources and are working on it.

I want to believe reasons why this won’t work, but it feels like cope. It would be smart to be prepared for the world where knowledge workers get replaced by AI and also prepared for the world where AI is a bubble that pops.

The goalposts on what neural nets can possibly do have already moved past chess, go, protein folding, coding, poker, math, the Turing test…