Kurzweil has been eerily right so far, and his timeline has AGI at 2029. When software can perform any unattended, self directed task (in principle) at least as well as any human over the sum total of all tasks that humans are capable of doing, we will have reached AGI.

Software can already write more text on any given subject better than a majority of humanity. It can arguably drive better across more contexts than all of humanity - any human driver over a billion miles of normal traffic will have more accidents than self driving AI over the same distance. Short stories, haikus, simple images, utility scripts, simple software, web design, music generation - all of these tasks are already superhuman.

Longer time horizons, realtime and continuous memory, a suite of metacognitive tasks, planning, synthesis of large bodies of disparate facts into novel theory, and a few other categories of tasks are currently out of reach, but some are nearly solved, and the list of things that humans can do better than AI gets shorter by the day. We're a few breakthroughs away, maybe even one big architectural leap, from having software that is capable (in principle) of doing anything humans can do.

I think AGI is going to be here faster than Kurzweil predicted, because he probably didn't take into consideration the enormous amount of money being spent on these efforts.

There has never been anything like this in history - in the last decade, over 5 trillion dollars has been spent on AI research and on technologies that support AI, like crypto mining datacenters that pivoted to AI, new power, water, data support, providing the infrastructure and foundation for the concerted efforts in research and development. There are tens of thousands of AI researchers, some of them working in private finance, some for academia, some doing military resarch, some doing open source, and a ton doing private sector research, of which an astonishing amount is getting published and shared.

In contrast, the entire world spent around 16 trillion dollars on world war II - all of the R&D and emergency projects and military logistics, humanitarian aid, and so on.

We have AI getting more resources and attention and humans involved in a singular development effort, pushing toward a radical transformation of the very concept of "labor" - while I think it might be a good thing if it is a decade away, even perpetually so until we have some reasonable plan for coping with it, I very much think we're going to see AGI within the very near future.

*When I say "in principle" I mean that given the appropriate form factor, access, or controls, the AI can do all the thinking, planning, and execution that a human could do, at least as well as any human. We will have places that we don't want robots or AI going, tasks reserved for humans, traditions, taboos, economics, and norms that dictate AI capabilities in practice, but there will be no legitimacy to the idea that an AI couldn't do a thing.