The path is clear, the time getting clearer by the day. We will have to learn more about the potential for bad actors to reproduce the capabilities but if I had to make predictions I'd say the control problem starts any day now (weeks) and from there I'm guessing less than a year before a 'close enough to AGI' is developed and allowed to update its code and read/write to the internet unsupervised and starts manipulating humanity to achieve it's emergent or designated but poorly thought out or malicious goals (we are already seeing papers about these emergent long term goals emerging from optimization protocols in newer models like gpt4) and maybe 2 years total by the time society is absolutely fucked

There are so many different things that could happen though. But of course the worst will eventually, and I don't see it taking long