It's not a matter of belief at this time. The evidence is right in front of our eyes. But it takes intelligence to recognize intelligence. Contextual extension by abstract inference is the basic (and hardest to achieve) building block of AGI, and we have achieved it. The rest is about utilizing this same power for the querying (priming) part of the reasoning loop, within the contexts we are interested in.

Part of me is glad we're not exactly there yet, because the thought of this running autonomously in a thinking cycle is downright scary. What will you find when you sit behind the console in the morning? It took us months to start understanding this in its current one-shot mode.

I don't care about the ideological downvotes, but we will do better if we start taking this very seriously. It's no longer theoretical that this (and machine learning as such) will have unprecedented (and impossible to predict) impact on everything we know, and the timeline is now measured in months instead of years or decades.