I read those papers too. And I write code and train models day in and day out. I could get very specific on what needs to be done, but that's what we do at our job. If you're curious, I'd say join the field.
I agree with you in that I don't think for a second anyone can make an accurate prediction of when we will AGI, but I have no doubt that it will be relatively soon, and that OpenAI will likely be one of the leaders, if not the leaders in creating it.
Exponential process continuing doesn't imply "we're going to get there soon" in any way, shape or form. The desired goal can still be arbitrarily far.
2) Our focus is on helping improve medical and clinical science and cancer tooling first.
3) If we needed AGI to cure cancer, perhaps we'd be working directly on AGI. If anyone thinks this is the case, please let me know, as at the moment I don't think it is.
So to build AI all that remains is to understand how it could work.
> but it's pretty clear what we need to do
It isn't (unless by "clear" you mean as clear as in your statement above). I've been following some of the more theoretical papers in the field, and we're barely even at the theory forming stage.
> but it's pretty clear we'll get there.
First of all, I don't doubt we'll get there eventually. Second, I'm not sure simulating a human entirely falls under the category of "artificial". After all, to be useful such a mechanism would need to outperform humans in some way, and we don't even know whether that's possible even in principle using the same mechanism as the brain's.