It's very difficult to get funding on projects that don't already have a track record of success.
Which is why all research facilities working in AI today that I have read about only do research on Neural Networks
Just look at what is being published in Arxiv.
Call your friends in university departments.
Ask people working in startups or corporation.
AI at this point is just Neural Networks.
Do I think it's a dead end for AGI?
I really don't know what AGI is, but for what ever new possibilities we can unlock.
We need newer techniques that are less intensive computationally.