Certainly debatable how close it is, but it seems obvious that it's improving in general ability. It's surely not moving away from AGI.
One other aspect is the business side: in the following years lots of buzzwords will be flying around and most to all of the entities involved in statistical learning applications will get stuck in a local minimum worth somewhere between $10 billion to $10 trillion: shareholders care about, well, shares, not AGI. Another invariant in the technological race is that the worst technology will always win in the short to medium term: in Ancient Greece slavery was preferred to the steam engine [2], in 1900 the internal combustion engine won, not the more logical electric vehicle, today we have Windows and MacOS as major operating systems, not Plan9, and so forth.
[1] Michael Levin, From physics to mind, timestamp discussing Xenobots, https://youtu.be/_QICRPFWDpg?t=1343
There is an _action_ there, a module, a function, that has to be working.
Is that not what an LLM is doing?
Note that I'm not saying LLMs are sentient or anything (however, I have thoughts on sentience in general). I am simply saying there's an obvious similarity between how humans think and LLMs -- and for whatever reason, so many people think we are special simply because we are "made of meat".
It is surely moving away from AGI. The implementations go in the opposite direction.
As already expressed: "Intelligence is evolving a world model through critical consideration. Unintelligence is acritical disconnected repetition".