AI's simmering question: where is all the automation?
A The Information column frames the industry debate over why automation has not arrived even as OpenAI said its unreleased model solved or made major progress on hundreds of significant math and computer science problems. Cognition founder Scott Wu argued that ever-more-capable agents plus more data centers, memory and sandboxes will yield "virtual employees," while ex-OpenAI researcher Diogo Almeida, now at TypeSafe AI, maker of Jev, said today's LLMs are optimized for assistance and fail at unattended automation. Anthropic's Claude Code product lead Cat Wu conceded much automation stalls at a semi-automated stage where Claude does 80% and a human does 20%.
It highlights the gap between rising model capability and real-world automation, nudging practitioners to focus on reliability and productization rather than benchmarks alone.