Its not our current location, but our trajectory that is scary.
The walls and plateaus that have been consistently pulled out from "comments of reassurance" have not materialized. If this pace holds for another year and a half, things are going to be very different. And the pipeline is absolutely overflowing with specialized compute coming online by the gigawatt for the foreseeable future.
So far the most accurate predictions in the AI space have been from the most optimistic forecasters.
There is a distribution of optimism, some people in 2023 were predicting AGI by 2025.
No such thing as trajectory when it comes to mass behavior because it can turn on a dime if people find reason to. Thats what makes civilization so fun.