For anyone who cares about the (single, cherry-picked, old) Fedorenko paper
Heh. It says a lot about the pace of AI research and discussion that a paper from last year is "old".
This is a common thread I notice in AI criticism, at least the criticism of the "AI isn't really thinking" or "AI can't really do much" sorts... it all references the state of the art from a year or two ago. In most fields that's entirely reasonable. I can read and reference physics or math or biology or computer science papers from last year and be pretty confident that I'm reading the current thinking. If I'm going to depend on it I should probably double-check, but that's just due diligence, I don't actually expect it to have been superseded. But in the AI field, right now, a year old is old. Three years old is ancient history, of historical interest only.
Even the criticism I see that doesn't make the mistake of looking at last year's state of the (public) art tends to make another mistake, which is to assume that you can predict what AI will be able to do a few years from now by looking at what it does now. Actually, most such criticism pretty much ignores the possibility that what AI will do in a few years will even be different from what it can do now. People seem to implicitly assume that the incredibly-rapid rate of change we've seen over the last five years will suddenly stop, right now.
For example, I recently attended the industry advisory board meeting for my local university's computer science department. The professors there, trying desperately to figure out what to teach CS students today, put together a very well thought-out plan for how to use AI as a teaching tool for freshmen, gradually ramping up to using it as a coding assistant/partner for seniors. The plan was detailed and showed great insight and a tremendous amount of thought.
I pointed out that however great a piece of work it was, it was based on the tools that exist today. If it had been presented as recently as 12 months ago, much of it wouldn't have made sense because agentic coding assistants didn't really exist in the same form and with the same capabilities as they do now. What are the odds that the tools won't change as much in the next 12 months as they have in the last 12 months? Much less the next four years, during the course of study of a newly-entering freshman.
The professors who did this work are smart, thoughtful people, of course, and they immediately agreed with my point and said that they had considered it while doing their work... but had done what they had anyway because prediction is futile and they couldn't do any better than making a plan for today, based on the tools of today, fully expecting to revise their plan or even throw it out.
What they didn't say, and I think were shying away from even thinking about, is that their whole course of study could soon become irrelevant. Or it might not. No one knows.