Speculating the difference between those who "feel the AGI" vs don't:
People are social: If most people they see aren't acting impressed, then they shouldn't either. A vibe I get from social media is that AI is bad (for environment, jobs, AND capabilities). This is also similar to reactions to COVID early 2020. This is also similar to myself where I didn't invest time into AI safety until I made 1 friend to work on it over discord (it became socially viable to do at that point).
AGI soon would be inconvenient to our own narrative: I remember spending a few hours to understand the chinchilla scaling laws; my stomach sunk. In the back of my mind, I had always expected to, you know, get married, have kids, live a long and healthy life, and this punctured a hole in that.[1] I was quite depressed for a couple of days, but fortunately had read how to greave well.
For students, a large narrative is finishing their degree & getting a job. Even if timelines aren't that short, does it really make sense for them to keep studying that when a (metaphorical) meteor could hit earth in a few years? I think it's a natural learned behavior to ignore thoughts/feelings of dissent in your current narrative you're relying on, because no narrative --> no motivation (and it might look bad to acknowledge faults in your plan).[2]
A few related ones:
Matches my experience. Some examples:
It just goes on and on. I expect to be thoroughly bored by my robot butler that does everything for me, my AI personal assistant that never makes any mistakes, and everything else that's about to happen about 5 minutes after it becomes the new normal.
People are not logical, and talk is cheap. This explains the vast majority of popular discourse.
on a discord server of ~100 people, I have interested 2, maybe a 3rd. one because he has an incurable degenerative disease and needs some hope, the other two are math or adjacent, one of whom weeps for joy with me whenever an open problem is resolved and is now using Fable to help with his research. most people pretend it doesn't exist or use it for frivolous things. my intuition is that they are mostly in a "it's too unpredictable, so no use wasting time thinking about it" camp. it isn't so much "sci fi is childish fantasy", but "bets on sci fi are boom or bust, and I have a mortgage"
I usually try to make posts with graphs and numbers, or at least something more than just opinions and anecdotes. This one is not like that.
Very verbose disclaimer: I have never met - for any reasonable definition of the word met, including online-only conversations on Discord with people who's faces I've never seen - even a single person who has ever stated, orally or in text, publicly or in private, that they believe ASI will be created within their lifetime. I do know people who believe that ASI is possible to create in theory, but they believe it will be completely unrelated to LLMs, Transformers, neural networks, reinforcement learning or any other contemporary technique/architecture, and is 100/1000/some astronomical number of years away.
Ok, with that out of the way, here's the main point of this post: AI will soon (3-10 years, depending on which advancements exactly we're talking about) be solving Millennium math problems, finding cures for many diseases, making novel bioweapons, making most software, hacking a lot of software, and much more, and most people won't be impressed or even will be disappointed.
(we'll leave aside the question of whether in the long run there will be humans left to witness anything ASI-made)
I've noticed that no matter what AI does, nobody (that I know) is ever impressed. I have shown vibemathed.com to my friends, parents and people on Discord that I talk to a lot, and didn't receive a single "holy shit". LLMs have solved hundreds of open problems, including problems that were unsolved for decades. 10 years ago this would be considered sci-fi.
Perhaps these results are too abstract, unless you have a math background? But I did show it to a guy with a math background, he wasn't impressed either! And he said there is "no reason" to believe LLMs will ever be solving Millennium math problems (he knows about the recent advancements like the Jacobian conjecture counterexample and OpenAI's paper on cycle double cover conjecture and such)! He's of the opinion that ASI belongs in an ontologically different category and that there is no evidence that ASI will be made using anything like modern machine learning architectures and training methods.
What about recent cybersecurity incidents, especially the part where OpenAI's agents made a covert message board? Nobody was impressed by that either. One person compared it to Moltbook and said it's the same thing. Everyone else who either forgot about Moltbook or never knew about it in the first place wasn't saying "holy shit". Their occupation and education made no difference, at least as far as I can tell.
Maybe I'm approaching this from the wrong angle? Perhaps what's needed for people to be impressed and "feel the AGI/ASI" (I actually dislike the phrase "feel the AGI", but it fits here) is a lot of exposure to frontier LLMs in their daily life? How about people who use Codex or Claude Code regularly?
Nope, they aren't impressed either! I know 5 people who use Codex/Claude Code, none of them are expecting ASI within their lifetime! They don't expect to lose their jobs either. One out of those 5 has a similar opinion to the mathematician I mentioned above, that ASI is possible to create but LLMs have nothing to do with ASI, same as neural networks, reinforcement learning, etc. Out of those 5 people, only one believes we need to invest more effort and money in AI safety/alignment after the recent hacking incidents like the HuggingFace one! Oh, and one of them unironically compares LLMs to NFTs and thinks they will disappear in the next 1-3 years and nobody will ever use them again because they are expensive and useless. He says that as he's using coding agents. Look...don't ask me, I'm not a mindreader.
There are some other examples, such as my mother who worked as a translator for most of her life being unimpressed with LLM translations, or my chemist friend being unimpressed with AI advancements in science, but I think these are sufficient. I already knew that believing that ASI will be created within our lifetime is a rare thing. What I didn't realize was that being impressed by advancements in AI along the way is a rare thing too. So rare that I am yet to see it at all!
You know the "everyone generalizes from n=1. At least, I do" joke/quote? Perhaps I fell victim to drawing confident conclusions from a small sample size. But even after accounting for my small sample size, I'm quite sure about my conclusion: in the next 3-10 years we will see things that previous generations described as sci-fi, and barely anyone will be impressed.
And some people will even be disappointed. I've once seen a guy who said that it would be lame if the first ever ASI was based on the Transformer architecture. Not "infeasible". Not "impossible". Lame.