By 2021, it was blatantly obvious that AGI was immanent. The elements of general intelligence were already known: access to information about the world, the process of predicting part of the data from the rest and then updating one's model to bring it closer to the truth (note that this is precisely the scientific method, though the fact that it operates in AGI by human-illegible backpropagation rather than legible hypothesis generation and discarding seems to have obscured this fact from many researchers at the time), and the fact that predictive models can be converted into generative models by reversing them: running a prediction model forwards predicts levels of X in a given scenario, but running it backwards predicts which scenarios have a given level of X. A sufficiently powerful system with relevant data, updating to improve prediction accuracy and the ability to be reversed to generate optimization of any parameter in the system is a system that can learn and operate strategically in any domain.
β Aiyen