> Being in the tail end of my PhD That doesn't really qualify you to make these anti-predictions any more than tens of thousands of other people working in thi

> Being in the tail end of my PhD That doesn't really qualify you to make these anti-predictions any more than tens of thousands of other people working in this field. There's also this phenomenon where experts close to a problem are worse at predicting the future because they are so intimately familiar with the problems that they can't see the forest for the trees. To me there is one major signal that AGI is much closer than 50 years away and that is the breakthrough with Transformers. Now we have a general purpose architecture for predicting the future that works really well, which is a key component in the brain (cortical columns). Clearly we're still at the early stages, but 50 years is a loooong time. 50 years ago we didn't even have the Altair 8800.