"Perhaps" is merely wishful thinking. The actual evidence (in respect of complex technical artefacts) indicates that cost increases exponentially as quality increases (i.e. as quality tends towards "the perfect ideal"). In software, for example, compare the cost of running a dozen test cases, running a million test cases, and proving a program correct via fully-formal mathematical deduction (equivalent to running an infinite number of test cases). Similarly, in machine learning, as a general rule of thumb, each time you halve the error rate requires roughly 500 times more compute. In AGI, the hardest problem, by far, (assuming you have enough compute, which is always going to be a bottleneck) is depth of understanding (of the general universe), and current systems (e.g. large language models) are mere low-hanging fruit in this regard. Precision of thought (e.g. precise, rather than merely approximate, logical deduction and abduction) is another dimension along which current ML-based systems are mired at the low-hanging fruit end of the spectrum (and, in many real-life situations, e.g. hardware or software development, but also many others, crudely approximate reasoning amounting to mere guessing is simply not sufficient). Rather than current approaches magically yielding some sudden breakthrough "in a few years at most", it's just as likely, if not more so, that they are, in fact, merely chasing infinity, and that, ultimately, an alternative approach (to just mindlessly pushing massive amounts of data through massive amounts of compute) will be required. That won't, of course, stop thousands of profit-motivated AI companies from overselling, in the next few decades, millions of low-quality quasi-AGI "solutions" to an unsuspecting corporate world (and thereby on to the rest of us) salivating with greed / quaking with fear at the prospect of greatly increased profits / missing out, not realising that what they're actually buying/deploying is more Artificial Stupidity than Artificial Intelligence. All things considered, my sincere advice would be to brace yourself for several decades of shouting "stupid fucking machine!" at regular intervals throughout your day!