In other words, just because you can imagine it, doesn't mean you get to treat your assumptions as fact.
What we know right now is that we don't have AGI. Therefore, we currently don't know how to achieve AGI. While it is possible that scaling current methods and models will get us there, it is also possible that it never gets us there.
And when you consider that we see examples of general intelligence everywhere, in other people and animals, operating at far less power than it takes to train these models, it's not out of hand to say that we are possibly barking up the wrong tree.
Then there is the matter of actually defining general intelligence. It may also be the definition of consciousness, or at least require it. But currently, there is no mutually agreed upon definition of "general intelligence". Some people try to define it as "has a lot of knowledge". In which case, a hard drive can be considered intelligent. Or even a book. But people generally accept neither as intelligent. So "knowledgeable" is not a fitting definition. Something with intelligence must be able to act on its knowledge.
And I think that's where consciousness would come into play, if it does. It could be that consciousness is needed to direct knowledge. And one's ability to direct that knowledge is what we would consider intelligence.
Which could be why LLMs plateau. They have no internal direction. They are pure knowledge without direction. We supply the direction. And we must navigate the nodes to find the knowledge we can use. LLMs can't really tell truth from falsehoods, we do that. Just like we do internally. We discard untrue things, or things that aren't quite what we were thinking, or some other filter. LLMs just expose that process because now part of our knowledge is contained in the LLM.
So, just because it's easy to imagine, it doesn't mean that it's possible.