I've got nothing but hand-waving, but after you've extracted all the smarts from every piece of text ever created, how do you get more?
Alpha Go had a game where the models could compete against each other. That let it become super human. What's the intelligence game we can create for LLMs? Even if you invent something, will it make the model smarter in a way the market values enough?
Then there's a race to use the weights more efficiently, or to offload information that shouldn't be in the weights in the first place (Karpathy's Cognitive Core). I like to imagine we train the models in something like Lojban, have a lightweight model translate from human language to that, and you can update the Sqlite or Postgres store it uses for knowledge.
And there's no barrier to entry for agent harnesses. So whatever loops or recursive orchestrated council of elders idea comes up, that won't protect the monopolies (duopolies).
Anyways, depending on your definitions, I think we'll hit AGI, but I don't think we're getting a Singularity this time around. Again though, this is all just hand-waving.
I think you’re thinking about it in slightly the wrong way. We’re not throwing more data at frontier models in hopes they get more/better capabilities somehow.
We’re either: setting up a verifiable task, and doing RLVR to get the model better at achieving that task.
Or we’re simply asking: “What do we want the model to do that it can’t now, and how do we curate data that would benefit it on that task?”
Most useful capabilities going forward aren’t going to come from data accidentally found on the net; that’s already all been scraped. You need to develop the dataset that shows how a model could perform insert task in its provided environment, and this still requires a decent bit of human ingenuity.