I think we've seen the cross-over point for AGI in the last few years. Just recently, within the last decade, we've seen incredible advances of the usefulness

I think we've seen the cross-over point for AGI in the last few years. Just recently, within the last decade, we've seen incredible advances of the usefulness of existing ML/NN based approaches. We have phones and smart speakers which have sufficiently reliable speech recognition. Ditto for vision tasks. What's different now compared to decades past is that businesses can see the benefit of incremental improvements in existing systems. If Siri can easily be demonstrated to be more useful than Cortana, that is a significant competitive advantage, which will sell products and services. The tech giants (and others) see this, so they will continue to invest. This isn't like in past where we tried things here and there, they didn't work as well as we had hoped, and then we stopped investing. The pressure is on all the tech giants to keep investing, and applying that research to more and more of their own businesses (like using ML to manage power and cooling at a data center). We're on a roller-coaster ride into the future, and nothing short of worldwide disaster will stop it. For good or for bad.