It's pretty obvious that GPT-4 isn't consistently coherent enough to carry out complex plans or to do serious scientific research. There are several other major shortcomings which also prevent this from being viable, too. And of course, it's possible that some of these shortcomings are very hard to "fix." We've had AI winters before, and self-driving seems to have stalled.
However, I strongly suspect that it's theoretically possible to build a machine that "thinks" as well as a human. And I no longer have any solid idea how far we are from that point, especially if we make certain architectural changes. We might be closer than we think. Or at least we should stop assuming that next-gen models are obviously safe.
nVidia's hope to increase training performance 1 million times in 10 years seems potentially dangerous to me. Anthrophic's plan to spend over $1 billion training next gen models seems awfully sketchy as well.