>AI development has figured out enough to brute force a path towards AGI?

I think what's been going on is compute/$ has been exponentially rising for decades in a steady way and has recently passed the point that you can get human brain level compute for modest money. The tendency has been once the compute is there lots of bright PhDs get hired to figure algorithms to use it so that bit gets sorted in a few years. (as written about by Kurzweil, Wait But Why and similar).

So it's not so much brute forcing AGI so much that exponential growth makes it inevitable at some point and that point is probably quite soon. At least that seems to be what they are betting.

The annual global spend on human labour is ~$100tn so if you either replace that with AGI or just add $100tn AGI and double GDP output, it's quite a lot of money.