Is this a pretty consensual viewpoint? Or is it hype from OpenAI?
Now the scaling hypothesis is basically just that sophisticated behavior emerges by itself as neural networks get bigger and get trained on more data with more complex problems. LLMs certainly show that so far, but to jump to an AGI I think we need to fix various shortcomings. It's certainly possible that a future version of an LLM will be an AGI, but imho that will also be thanks to current and future improvements like adding an internal dialogue or medium-term memory. Or maybe LLMs just can't scale that far, because experiencing the world through text is insufficient.
I guess our understanding of the laws of physics haven't changed that much. So someone predicting that free energy will be impossible is likely correct.