not long ago these people would have you believe that a next word predictor trained on reddit posts would somehow lead to artificial general superintelligence
I don't understand why you'd be so dismissive about this. It's looking less likely that it'll end up happening, but is it any less believable than getting general intelligence by training a blob of meat?
This is a bad comparison. Intelligence didn't appear in some human brain. Intelligence appeared in a planetary ecosystem.
Also it took hundreds of millions of years to get here. We're basically living in an atomic sliver on the fabric of history. Expecting AGI with 5 of years of scraping at most 30 years of online data and the minuscule fraction of what has been written over the past couple of thousand years was always a pie-in-the-sky dream to raise obscene amounts of money.