Even if AGI had already come, which I don't think it has yet, the fact that someone predicted in 1999 with any non-negligible degree of confidence that AGI would come around now is a reason *not* to take them seriously in my opinion. That's because the various pieces of the puzzle that now make it plausible to think AGI is not very far off, although once again we still don't know exactly when it will come, didn't fall into place until much later, so anyone making such a specific prediction back in 1999 couldn't have had a good argument for it. This illustrates one of the many reasons why I think predictions are overrated as an epistemic benchmark. It's easy to be right for the wrong reasons and wrong for the right reasons, so you should pay more attention to the quality of the arguments that people use and doomers make terrible arguments all the time. Another issue is that, though in some cases you can show they have a pretty good track-record on verifiable predictions in recent years, those predictions are about relatively narrow questions and I don't think we have good reasons to think they translate into reliable predictive ability on the broader questions that most people really care about, but people are trying to sell their track-record on the former as a reason to defer to them on the latter. Again, in light of the sloppy arguments they make all the time, I don't think the fact that e. g. they were able to predict accurately e. g. how SOTA models would score on SWE-bench is a good reason to update a lot based on their predictions about the economic consequences of AI or even x-risk.