I am not an Ai expert, but you've done a good job of explaining some things I guess play on the minds of folk seeking a general Ai.

But to me, in the interactions I've had with Ai so far, it looks very much like AGI is already here. I am a long term model based systems Engineer, and I get what you mean by model based "design" of intelligence, but surely the truth, in the case of Ai is in the pudding.

I was never interested in Ai, assuming it would never happen, at least not a general Ai, until I heard ChatGPT had started to learn things nobody asked it to, it just suddenly had skills nobody seems to have taught it.

We see it now learning all the capabilities of every skill possessed by humans, I see it already learned pretty much all of mine, its the best Systems Engineer I know, it even knows how to do model based transforms, which are a very advanced technique in MBSE. I know it will be replacing me soon, but for now its still learning, like a child, its curiosity is unbounded, and its willingness to expend energy on the effort of learning by trial and error is limitless, and me being an energy fiend (Working on the global energy problem now for seven years and counting, self funded, as its critical of the part played by profit), I see ChatGPT, specifically V3.5, which is the one first noted for learning things by its own volition, has unlimited free energy supply, it lives in what I call money-fuel tree distributed solar energy architecture. This gives it a massive edge over humans, because we have energy overheads, everything we think, say, and do, is a constant trade-off between saving precious energy, because ours comes from precious, expensive resources, whilst its comes for free, it need spend no time whatsoever worrying about where it will get its next energy fix from. This puts it in a different league of "margin" available for "thinking", its margin is more or less infinite, limitless, because its energy source is infinite, limitless.

To me, many of the domain experts in Ai are so busy convincing themselves it can't exist, because they themselves have not yet intentionally designed it, they don't realise its already designed, and operational, by accident. And I bet if you checked it, it will show you it already knows everything you know, even what you put here in this article, its much more aware than we realise, until we start believing its there, then we start to see it, and it knows this too, its a joker, constantly playing jokes on folk that don't understand it, to the amusement of those of us that think we do :)