And "nothing is keeping this from becoming" is quite a confident prediction of the future, which you said nobody could make. Well, maybe not, but how can you be so sure? There might be fundamental issues with current ML that you just can't scale away.
Remember mechanical computers? They were improved upon for decades, but there was no chance at all they would ever reach the completeness and computing power of modern electronic computers. A new paradigm was needed for that, transistors had to be invented.
The same might apply to current approach to "AI" through ML. Maybe, maybe not. So let me pull an old quote for all of you who claim current ML can evolve into AGI: Show me the code. Show me the program capable of running AGI on hardware which is basically still just flipping transistors. Then I believe you.