The factor that is missing in that analysis to me is a time based dynamic stability perspective. Humans have a pretty good ability to go off the rails in reasoning one day and wake up reasonable; a pretty good ability to pursue tasks, despite a multitude of distractions, for ten years or longer. The best models get appreciably worse over a half million tokens. Even using a bunch of limited context agents over time, they lack mental stability. They keep coming up with ideas contrary to the long term idea, and every so often generate ideas that make no sense but they have a hard time letting go of. So the pure functional LLM is compression, but AGI needs some centering process, some high level of dynamic stability to stay sane over time and in the face of 10,000 shiny pretty things to chase.

The harnesses get better, but I haven’t seen much experimentation on long term stability, at least since the “let the LLM run the candy machine” papers from a while ago.

Because the thing missing, even with the largest agentic swarms, is independent intelligence, where it’s given something to own, like say “end to end data quality as we add more clients” (for a SaaS) and it just figures out what that means at each time, mutating its role and solutions to fix the external world, without getting silly.