Check out cases of people using GPT-4 to help automate their coding (on Twitter and elsewhere). It's not ready for harder problems but we're just 1-3 key ideas away from solving those as well.
To solve harder coding problems, one needs to be able to extrapolate properly. When an AI can do that, it's basically AGI and can probably solve any cognitive problems a human is capable of. Combined with its other qualities like massive communication bandwidth, self-replication with ease, travel at the light speed, it will be ready to take over the world from humanity if it wants to.
Wikipedia cannot do the followings which even current AI can:
* Minerva: Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with Language Models https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/06/minerva-solving-quantitati...
* What can AI do in 30 minutes? https://oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/superhuman-what-can-ai...
For that matter, most signatories of the petition (and myself) were never persuaded by most other "revolutionary" ideas you mentioned above.
See the names and accomplishments of the signatories at the bottom part of the page: https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experime...
What OpenAI insider could have said? That ChatGPT is a glorified search engine with categorization algo that copy stuff from several websites and put it together (without providing source of its revolutionary result, which makes this even less useful then wikipedia).