That's not what this is about. Performance is the one thing in computing that has fairly consistently gone up over time. If something is human equivalent today, or some appreciable fraction thereof - which it isn't, not yet, anyway - then you can place a pretty safe bet that in a couple of years it will be faster than that. Model efficiency is under constant development and in a roundabout way I'm pretty happy that it is as bad as it is because I do not think that our societies are ready to absorb the next blow against the structures that we've built. But it most likely will not stay that way because there are several Manhattan level projects under way to bring this about, it is our age's atomic bomb. The only difference is that with the atomic bomb we knew that it was possible, we just didn't know how small you could make one. Unfortunately it turned out to be that yes, you can make them and nicely packaged for delivery by missile, airplane or artillery.

If AGI is a possibility then we may well find it, quite possibly not on the basis of LLMs but it's close enough that lots of people treat it as though we're already there.