I guess John Carmack falls somewhere in between but as a complete layperson when he said he gave AGI by 2030 a 50 percent chance, that at least indicated to me that some really smart people think there is a chance.
1. He predicts "signs of life" by 2030, which is a (probably intentionally) vague statement.
2. He raised $20MM for an AI startup, which is fine and well but also makes him not entirely disincentivized from hype.
3. I wouldn't characterize him as someone in the trenches of deep learning.
More of a meta point: technical depth in more than a few things is impossible in a human lifespan, and just a bit harder once you become a "somebody" since a portion of your life becomes consumed by the fact that you're a "somebody". You end up doing things like raising VC money and starting companies with bold ambitions. Its own time sink.
I had this realization when I had a conversation with Lamport about a niche topic in distributed systems and he expressed a position that was just wrong. It was a minor point that didn't really matter much at all, but he was pretty confident in a conjecture I knew was wrong. To be clear, the fact that no one can be an expert on everything -- even everything within a subfield of CS -- doesn't detract from the fact that geniuses exist. Someone can "forget more than you know" and also not know something that you know. Life is just sadly very short.
Thats true, he seems to have flopped on the rockets startup too, although you might argue AI is still much closer to his wheelhouse than aerospace so it make more sense. Before hearing that I had some vague idea that the most AI experts timeline for AI was significantly longer and some never.
