I also think human level (and beyond) AGI is inevitable, but that in of itself says nothing about the time frame in which it will be achieved. People have been

I also think human level (and beyond) AGI is inevitable, but that in of itself says nothing about the time frame in which it will be achieved. People have been predicting AI/AGI ever since the advent of computers over 70 years ago, and estimates have always been way over-optimistic. It's perhaps relevant to note that the reason estimates have always been off seems to be that people have always thought that the technology of the day was sufficient, and that it was just a matter of applying it. So far we've had procedural programming (SHRLDU), expert systems (CYC), general-purpose problem solvers (SOAR), PDP/connectionist approaches, modern neural nets, LLMs... I do think we're getting closer, and that neural nets will get us there (maybe not with gradient descent as the learning method though). There have been lots of valuable lessons and insights learned from various neural net architecture, not least of which is the confirmation by LLMs that prediction seems to be the basis (or at least one of major pillars) of intelligence. And yet, I can't help but feel that there is still a long way to go ...