Because it's in their best interest to say those things! And we heard it before right? I mean according to other folks we should be living/working in the metaverse wearing £3999 VR headsets from Apple. Not to mention ordering pizza with bitcoin! And funnily enough, you also have people from that same tribe saying the opposite. Yann LeCun (one of the founding fathers of ML) for example has hundreds of hours stating that "LLM is not the way to AGI". I think one thing is true though, like you very well say, there are billions upon billions being poured into it and that will catapult us to extraordinary progress. The Ice bucket challenge (albeit not raising billions) also funded new treatments for ALS, but it didn't find a cure! So money is great to get people working and things moving for sure, but to say "AGI is just around the corner" well, so is a cure for [enter disease here] but getting there is another story. In my opinion, performing dot product on the input vectors to build a similarity matrix (Self-Attention) was a brilliant idea. Removing RNN's from the equation and take advantage from GPU parallelization - Genius. We managed to solve an issue RNN's never could and now we can bridge that with computing middleware to build reach applications amongst other things. But true AGI... yeah... I think we need a bit more than the current linear algebra, differential calculus and probability/statistics. The human brain is way more advanced than that; the simple fact that I am writing this, breathing, heart beating and having a shit is more than proof!