Has there been any advancement in an "AI executive" lately? ie, a layer that sits above a number of other networks and drives it towards structured goal seeking like reproduction, food, pain avoidance?
Until an agent takes some sort of initiative in directing its learning process, its behavior will remain scripted and passive, never amounting to more than a recognizer of patterns -- a rather low bar in the quest for autonomous intelligence, IMHO.
There can be no AGI without hierarchical, "meta" NNs.