Does Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0 stop working in the presence of traffic cones?
More seriously, the distance between "sort of works" and "works" might not be infinite, but it most likely involves fundamentally unpredictable future developments of the current technology. There is no straight line of incremental improvements that gets us there.
It's fairly straightforward to imagine that if you have a 4.77mhz CPU and 64kb of RAM you will soon have a 3ghz CPU and 64gb RAM.
Bigger number going brrr is no guarantee of anything, here, so much so that models using a fraction of GPT4's resources are somewhat competitive.
By all means continue developing the technology, but claims that we are within arms' reach of X for disparate values of X are not exactly supported by anything.