Yeah I don't think we're going to come closer to a real AGI until we manage to make a model that can actually understand and think. An LLM sounds smart but it just picks the most likely response from the echoes of a billion human voices. I'm sure we'll get there but not with this tech. I'm pretty sure even be OpenAI said this with their 5 steps to AGI, LLMs were only step 1. And probably the part that will do the talking in the final AI but not the thinking.

At the moment people are so wooed by the confidence of current LLMs that they forget that there's all sorts of types of AI models. I think the key is going to be to have them work together, each doing the part they're good at.