It seems rather more likely to me, even if it's millennia way, that we get a semblance of an autonomous agentic AI, than what you suggest.

It might be impossible, or just need some innovations (eg, transformer), but my point is the investments are non-linear.

They are not investing X to get a return of Y.

If someone reaches AGI, current business models, ROI etc will be meaningless.

> If someone reaches AGI, current business models, ROI etc will be meaningless.

sure, but its still a moonshot, compared to our current tech. I think such hope leaves us vulnerable to cognitive biases such as sunk cost fallacies. If Jesus comes back that really would change everything, that's the clarion call of many cults that end in tragedy.

I imagine there is fruit that is considerably lower hanging, that has more obvious ROI but is just considerably less sexy than AGI.

Probably the most reliable person I can think of to estimate that would be Hassabis at Deepmind and he's saying like 5 years give or take a factor of two. (for AGI, not Jesus)

head guy at Meta stated in a talk that current techniques ain't gonna be enough and they at least need to start to be more creative.

Yeah that seems the consensus. There are lots of people working on the stuff though.