I don't have a strong opinion on whether something we'd universally agree to call "AGI" is particularly close, but in terms of physical automation, I would say that we're on the cusp of having a lot of not-quite-AGI AIs that all together could have a similar effect. It doesn't seem to me like we'll need AGI for "good enough" versions of things like Waymo, Tesla Optimus, or automated specialized construction and manufacturing machinery. I can easily imagine that another 5 - 10 years of steady advancements followed by throwing all of our collective economic might at full-scale production deployment would be sufficient to kick off the next industrial revolution. As the first two helped make slave labor obsolete, IRIII would more generally make most physical human labor obsolete.

As far as current LLM capabilities, I do think there's a massive amount of untapped demand even for that. ChatGPT is like the AOL of genAI — the first majorly successful consumer mass market product, but still ultimately just a proof of concept to capture the popular imagination. The real value will be seen as agents start getting plugged into everything, new generations of startups and small businesses are built from the ground up on LLM-driven business processes by non-technical founders with tiny teams, and any random teenager has a team of AI assistants actively managing their social life and interacting with a variety of platforms on their behalf.

Tons of things that big businesses and public figures pay full-time salaries for humans to do will suddenly become accessible to small uncapitalized ventures and everyday people. None of that requires a fundamental improvement to LLMs as we know them today, just cost reduction through increased supply and continued work by the tech industry to integrate and package these capabilities in user-friendly forms. If ChatGPT is AOL, then 5G, mobile, IOT, smart devices, e-commerce, streaming, social media, and so on should all be right around the corner.