I think there are legitimate research questions and concerns about AGI; unfortunately there&#x27;s also a <i>lot</i> of fluff surrounding the area (e.g. singularity stuff, doomsday scenarios, etc.).<p>The way I see it, there&#x27;s only one conceptual barrier to cross between current AI and &quot;AGI-like&quot; technology, which could be summed up as &#x27;models which take themselves into account&#x27;.<p>Whilst it&#x27;s trivial to have software modify itself, we don&#x27;t have good models for predicting what those modifications will do (in a way which is more computationally efficient than just running them). An analogy is how encoding programs as ANNs lets us perform gradient descent, which we couldn&#x27;t do if we encoded them as e.g. string of Java code.<p>If we find a powerful software model which allows efficient prediction with white-box self-references, then I think lots of progress will be made quite quickly.