I think AGI by that definition (ability to self-improve) is closer than many people think largely because current models are very close to human intelligence in many domains. They can answer questions, derive theorems, write code, navigate websites, etc. All the work that current AI research scientists do is no more than these general information processing tasks, scaled up in terms of creativity, long-term coherence, sensitivity to bad/good ideas over the span of a larger context window, etc.

The leap between Opus 4.7/GPT 5.5 and what would be sufficient for AGI seems smaller than the leap between The invention of the Transformer model (2017) and today, thus by a very conservative estimate I think it will take no more time between then and now as it will between now and an AI model as smart as any human in all respects (so by 2035). I think it will be shorter though because the amount of money being put into improving and scaling AI models and systems is 100000x greater than it was in 2017.