AGI is convergent. Now that there are multiple countries and many well funded companies and government groups working on parts of it, it means that almost all of them can fail and it won't change anything.

It means that if someone tries inferior proto-AGI prototype X1, but building it gives them some information on what they screwed up, X2 will be closer to something that works. And so on. Even going wrong directions is ok when you can try thousands of things in parallel.

It means that once you hit the "proto" AGI stage - some deeply inferior machine that just barely works - it just has to design a better version of itself over a few hours and then...

The reason this didn't happen prior to now - the reason it didn't happen in the 1960s when early AI researchers thought the problem might not be as difficult as it is - is they didn't have close to enough computing power and memory. It turns out to take thousands and thousands of TOPS, and terabytes of memory.

What was solely the domain of supercomputers 10 years ago - in fact we're effectively throwing more computing power than any supercomputer on earth into AI research each day right now. Maybe as much as all of them combined.