That's the usual way of things. Most of the time research progress is made at the boundary without anybody seeing the path. It happens more like slips in a fault line; little sudden steps forward in one area that nobody anticipated, and which create new strains elsewhere along the fault line, as those discoveries open up new attacks on old problems. Gradually the problem yields but not according to anybody's big plan.
In that sort of situation, the rate of progress is affected by two things: how many people are working at the frontier figuring out the problems that prevent the field from progressing, and how much economic pressure there is to exploit each new solution that gets identified. When the economic pressure is low, new breakthroughs mostly stay in the lab and circulate slowly. Researchers will come up with ideas that could solve the problem but don't have resources to test every one. But when the pressure is great, each new breakthrough quickly scales up, and more ideas get tested in parallel.
Sometimes a bunch of progress does happen on a schedule, as part of a master-planned research effort, like the Manhattan or Apollo projects, or semiconductor lithography R&D schedules. In those cases the main pathway is known at the outset but there a bunch of novel engineering sub-problems to solve along the way. Most research doesn't happen that way though. And even when it does, to anybody on the outside who doesn't themselves see the route laid out from a high altitude, it looks the same. And even in these cases, there may be a few big-picture questions that they aren't sure about until late into the project, resulting in multiple paths being tried at once to improve the chance of success.
I think there are several hard, fundamental problems currently being grappled with that stand between today's AI and AGI, and unlike Sam Altman I don't think scaling will be enough to overcome them. But I do think there are now tremendous forces being deployed to grapple with them, and tremendous pressures being built up behind that, so any slips along the fault line could yield rapid movement forward.
Is this hype to drive investment? Depends who you're listening to. If they're an executive at NVIDIA or OpenAI then sure, it probably is. But not all of it. One of the main advocates for the view that I share is Eliezer Yudkowsky, who has been talking about this since before AI was on any CEO's radar. His latest book is called "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies". I'm not sure how he could phrase his concerns in any less-appealing way to an investor.