OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

I'm surprised that any of these companies consider what they are working on to be Artificial General Intelligences. I'm probably wrong, but my impression was AGI meant the AI is self aware like a human. An LLM hardly seems like something that will lead to self-awareness.

Nah, at best we found a way to make one part of a collection of systems that will, together, do something like thinking. Thinking isn’t part of what this current approach does.

What’s most surprising about modern LLMs is that it turns out there is so much information statistically encoded in the structure of our writing that we can use only that structural information to build a fancy Plinko machine and not only will the output mimic recognizable grammar rules, but it will also sometimes seem to make actual sense, too—and the system doesn’t need to think or actually “understand” anything for us to, basically, usefully query that information that was always there in our corpus of literature, not in the plain meaning of the words, but in the structure of the writing.