AGI is a marketing term used to encourage continued investment in an industry that is not even close to breaking even commensurate with its investment. Even so, this is a false dichotomy: scaling is clearly not a path on its own to superintelligence. OpenAI developed Sora largely because the amount of revenue they need to produce any return on investment is massive and not clear whatsoever. And in fact, I don't even believe any of the frontier labs believe that AGI by any conventional definition is within reach within their likely runways.

Wasn't video generation one of their big stepping stones towards AGI? "Simulating worlds", reasoning about physics and real world interactions and all that?

Or are they still doing that behind the scenes and just decided that offering it to the public isn't profitable?

Too bad they aren’t doing either!

LLMs will not lead to AGI, so if that’s the goal, they’d do better to stick with making video slop.