General intelligence has been 20 years away since the 60s, along with fusion power and a bunch of other things.

In marketing, they say 5 years when it's actually 20 years away.

In my view, AGI is farther away than fusion.

We know how to do fusion. We know the physics behind it. We haven't yet figured out how to build profitable fusion plants, and we probably won't for a long time, if for no other reason than improvements in fission--modern fission plants are the best .

When it comes to AGI, we have no clue. It's a constantly moving target, because our conceptions of intelligence evolve. Most things that were once "AI" became "non-AI" solved problems after we got good at them using a couple key insights, e.g. that image processing could be sped up with CNNs due to the existence of a topology on the inputs. We still have no idea what makes us tick, and moreover there is not a strong economic incentive to replicate all of our intelligence... although, of course, automation will continue and that itself will be disruptive enough.

I disagree with part of this. Nature has proven that general intelligence can be achieved in a compact, energy-efficient form: humans.

Has nature ever proven that nuclear fusion can be sustained at human scale?

I would bet that agi comes first.

I think they're both sort of in the same place.

We're fairly certain it can be done given unbounded resources, we have some idea of the principles involved, but then there's a rather significant element of "draw the rest of the fucking owl" between where we are and where we imagine we could go.

He says AGI could happen in 20 years, not that he will single handedly manifest it into existence. That seems like a reasonable timeline given the field's current pace and may even be conservative.