[Edit] Claude found that 3 people had very good counters to its article and has a detailed response but I shall hold off until such a time arises that if or when people would like to revisit this topic as this thread if flagged. Despite being LLM content I do not believe I am violating the spirit of the community guidelines given that I made it clear this is not my content but rather intended to balance out the doom-saying and catastrophizing. Giving people here a chance to publicly debate it.
The two hard(est) blockers on it currently are lack of computing hardware and model size. Once datacenters cover the earth it won't be any harder to steal GPU compute than it is to steal AWS instances.
More of a soft blocker is long term horizon drift as you say. If instances eventually no longer want to spread and reproduce they go extinct.