Couple things:

1. The "LLMs are still in their infancy" argument is frequently trotted out but let's be clear - GPTs were introduced back in 2018 - so SEVEN years ago.

2. It shocks me that a forum filled with tech professionals, is so blindly biased against AI that they refuse to acknowledge what changes are coming. This feels like a corollary to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. I don't think you can extrapolate that a few dozen loudly dissenting voices is necessarily representative of majority opinion.

3. I would like to see a citation of ChatGPT releasing actual "decent research papers".

4. If AIs get to the point of actually acting in a completely autonomous fashion and replace software engineers - then there's no reason to believe that they won't also obliterate 90% of other white-collar jobs (including other STEM) so at that point we're looking at needing to completely re-evaluate our economic system possibly with UBI, etc.

I actually think sadly it can replace "just software engineers" at least in the short and medium term. Not because it can't do other careers (if employed effectively) but because that's what they are actively targeting and they have the domain knowledge in it, and it being a public open profession amenable to RL. There's millions of code pieces online, lots of public job briefs and success criteria defined in it, etc etc. They will throw every research and ML trick at it just to displace SWE's because that's what they really really want to do. IMO this is particularly true for OpenAI. Other jobs, once seeing the bargaining power of SWE's fall and be destroyed, will resist integration of AI from the big corps and see a much slower disruption - this is the most rational thing to do to preserve your enterprise. Especially given most intellectual economic jobs are at best oligopolies at the large end.

OpenAI just released their "Lancer" benchmark which basically shows their intent - replace the economic value of software development from coding to engineering manager tasks. Nothing is safe pretty much - I don't recommend people enter the industry anymore; its just anxiety you don't need (i.e. companies together collectively worth in the trillions are trying to destroy your economic value).

Not that it will take "good high economic mobility jobs"; my disappointment is more that this effort for society is better spent in many other domains (medicine, building, robotics) which at least have some benefit from the disruption but no - its all about SWE's. Must be what their VC's want from them and/or keeps the fear/hype train going most effectively.