Personally, having worked on AI research in the late 80s and early 90s I don't observe a lot of progress in replicating general intelligence. Of course, there has been a huge amount of progress in special purpose systems leveraging the huge amount of computing power we have now - but the fundamentals of general intelligence look as puzzling now as they did 20 years ago. I don't believe that we really have the right algorithms and it's simply a matter of scaling up the underlying hardware.

I think the most likely way to achieve a "real" general intelligence will be by reverse engineering how functioning brains and minds work. At least is an area where continual, albeit rather slow, progress is being made - eventually we will know how the mind works (assuming that there isn't anything fundamentally weird going on - which seems unlikely).

Once we understand how minds actually work I suspect there should be a good chance that we can upgrade/optimize these structures - either by architectural improvements or by throwing more resources at the areas that constrain current performance in biological brains. At that point things really could get rather exciting - but I don't expect this to happen in my lifetime (I'm in my 40s).