[bcrl]

The biggest obstacle to AGI is data.

Take the knowledge the average human has about integrating visual information with texture of an object. Nearly every adult can take a quick glance around a room and have a good idea what it will feel like to run your fingers along its surface, or your lips, or even your tongue, and be able to describe the experience. We have this knowledge because when we were infants and toddlers, everything we encountered was picked up, pulled towards our mouth, and touched by our hands. An AGI inside a computer cannot have that experience today, so it will lack the foundations of intelligence that humans have built up by interacting with the real world.

At some point it will become possible to either collect that data or simulate an experience sufficiently accurately to mimic the development a human child goes through. Until that happens, true AGI will be out of reach as it will have deficiencies the average human does not.

That said, a lot of people will try to get to that point using other means, and they'll probably get pretty close, albeit with really weird hallucinations in the corner cases.