There are good reasons why they don't or can't do simple param upscaling anymore, but still, it makes me bearish on AGI since it's a slow, but massive shift in goal setting.
In practice this still doesn't mean 50 % of white collar can't be automated though.
Let me ask you this, though: if we wanted to, what percentage of white collar jobs could have been automated or eliminated prior to LLMs?
Meta has nearly 80k employees to basically run two websites and three mobile apps. There were 18k people working at LinkedIn! Many big tech companies are massive job programs with some product on the side. Administrative business partners, program managers, tech writers, "stewards", "champions", "advocates", 10-layer-deep reporting chains... engineers writing cafe menu apps and pet programming languages... a team working on in-house typefaces... the list goes on.
I can see AI producing shifts in the industry by reducing demand for meaningful work, but I doubt the outcome here is mass unemployment. There's an endless supply of bs jobs as long as the money is flowing.
The reality is that you could run LinkedIn with far, far fewer people. You probably need fewer than 100 for core engineering, and likely less than 1,000 overall if you include compliance, sales, and so on - especially since a lot of overseas compliance stuff is outsourced to consulting firms, it's not like you have a team of lawyers in every country in the world.
Before there was so much money in the system, we used to run companies that way. Two decades ago, I worked for a company that had tens of millions of users, maintained its own complex nationwide infra (no AWS back then), and had 400 full-time employees. That made coordination problems a lot easier too. We didn't need ten layers of people and project management because there just wasn't that many of us.