Alexander Embiricos, head of product development for OpenAI’s Codex coding agent, has identified human typing speed as a significant obstacle to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), a goal pursued by major AI companies.
Embiricos made these comments during an appearance on “Lenny’s Podcast” on Sunday, highlighting that human typing speed, or multitasking speed when writing prompts, is the “current underappreciated limiting factor” to AGI. AGI refers to AI capable of reasoning as well as or better than humans.
According to Embiricos, even if an AI agent can observe all the work being done, the lack of validation of its output by humans creates a bottleneck. “You can have an agent watch all the work you’re doing, but if you don’t have the agent also validating its work, then you’re still bottlenecked on, like, can you go review all that code?” he explained.
To overcome this limitation, Embiricos advocates for redesigning systems to alleviate the need for humans to write prompts and validate AI output, as humans lack the speed required for rapid progress in these tasks. “If we can rebuild systems to let the agent be default useful, we’ll start unlocking hockey sticks,” he stated, referring to the phenomenon of hockey stick growth where progress remains flat before suddenly spiking upward.
Embiricos noted that achieving fully automated workflows will not follow a single path; instead, each use case will require a tailored approach. He predicted that early adopters will experience significant productivity increases, described as hockey stick gains, starting next year, with larger companies achieving similar results over the following years.
The emergence of AGI is expected to occur during the interval between the initial productivity surges of early adopters and the point when tech giants fully automate processes using AI agents. “That hockey-sticking will be flowing back into the AI labs, and that’s when we’ll basically be at the AGI,” Embiricos said, indicating that the feedback loop of heightened productivity into AI research will drive the realization of AGI.
