"Undefined", although not literally, in practice definitely: each letter of that initialism means a different thing to different people. To that extent, I'll even grant "speculative" despite many of those meanings being demonstrably met by us humans.

But as someone who (unfortunately) has just turned 40: who was it that was promising AGI "in the near future" for more than my entire lifetime? Including the second AI winter? Because even the biggest timeline-optimists I can remember (Kurzweil and Yudkowsky), who very few cared to listen to, put things more than 20 years ahead of when they were writing. (And yes, Yudkowsky was definitely wrong about a singularity in 2021, though as you say AGI is undefined I think if someone in 1996 had seen ChatGPT they'd have said "yes, this is AGI" despite its flaws).

Now the crowdsourced guess for AGI is 7 about years: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-...

> I don't see copyright holders lying down for one else's benefit and I don't see governments gutting copyright, contract law, and several other avenues of protection that copyright holders can deploy in the name of something that doesn't exist and may not exist.

I tend to agree. Although I don't accept that contract law has much of anything to do with this discussion, to the extent that it does have implications, it isn't going anywhere.

But at the same time, Google exists by reading the entire public internet, indexing it, and presenting clips of it to its users. This has in fact resulted in copyright disputes, and I was surprised how long it took for that to happen. Likewise, while copyright holders must fight for their survival, mere LLMs even as they exist right now are economically relevant, so this isn't going to be a one-sided fight by just copyright holders.