IMO …
The people saying true human-equivalent AI is imminent are falling for what amounts to a magic trick that appears to credulous uninitiated people to be real.
Progress is being made. As a society we will have to contend with increasingly useful artificial something-akin-to-intelligence. Which might eventually become so useful to capitalists that labor becomes much less economically valuable than it was. But not any time soon.
Last of all, in futurist AI circles, “the singularity” does not refer to the first creation of a human-equivalent intelligence. It refers to the creation of a greatly super-human intelligence that then rapidly and exponentially improves itself to levels far beyond human comprehension or control. Making an actual human-equivalent intelligence is a necessary step along that road, and an obvious signpost once we get there. But that’s a long way short of “the singularity”.