The theoretical foundation of transformers is well understood; they're able to approximate a very wide family of functions, particularly with chain of thought ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07923 ). Training them on next-token-prediction is essentially training them to compress, and more optimal compression requires a more accurate model of the world, so they're being trained to model the world better and better. However you want to define intelligence, for practical purposes models with better and better models of the world are more and more useful.
The disagreement here seems merely to be about what we mean by “AGI”. I think there’s reasons to think current approaches will not achieve it, but also reason to think they will.
In any case anyone who is completely sure that we can/can’t achieve AGI is delusional.
