i think part of the problem, though, is that we've already hit many of the warning signs that AGI is coming, and people have kept moving the goalposts. if you were to tell someone from ten years that there's an ai that has passed the turing test and has made novel mathematical discoveries, i think many would say AGI is already here.
The old observation that people tend to define AI as whatever computers can't do yet is as true as ever. It's getting a bit absurd, moving from demanding "general intelligence" to replicating human cognitive phenomenology (the experience of cognitive activities). Yet LLMs can already somewhat (confabulation-prone) introspect their own "internal unspoken thoughts" in their residual streams, quite fascinating.
You're right, in that we would have said that.
I wouldn't frame it as moving the goalposts in a bad way, though. We understand more now than we did then, so we have a better idea of what the actual goal is, and moving the goalposts to frame that goal is more rational than insisting the goalposts stay where they were ten years ago even though the entire pitch has changed since then. I'm straining the analogy, obviously.
Moving the goalposts, so to speak, is how science works! We must of course update the things we think based on an improved understanding of how the world works. Only the deeply incurious could consistently demand that one adhere dogmatically to a prior way of understanding the world in the face of changing knowledge. It's important not to treat science as a game to be won (of which 'goalposts' are evocative), but as the collaborative effort that it is.
Note well that I have not said LMs are not useful, only that no amount of interaction with them has not convinced me they remotely approach general intelligence. Their actual function of heuristically regurgitating all information ever known to mankind remains extremely useful in lots of domains.