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

Right. If you generate some code with ChatGPT, and then try to find similar code on the web, you usually will. Search for unusual phrases in comments and for variable names. Often, something from Stack Overflow will match.

LLMs do search and copy/paste with idiom translation and some transliteration. That's good enough for a lot of common problems. Especially in the HTML/Javascript space, where people solve the same problems over and over. Or problems covered in textbooks and classes.

But it does not look like artificial general intelligence emerges from LLMs alone.

There's also the elephant in the room - the hallucination/lack of confidence metric problem. The curse of LLMs is that they return answers which are confident but wrong. "I don't know" is rarely seen. Until that's fixed, you can't trust LLMs to actually do much on their own. LLMs with a confidence metric would be much more useful than what we have now.

People who "follow" AI, as the latest fad they want to comment on and appear intelligent about, repeat things like this constantly, even though they're not actually true for anything but the most trivial hello-world types of problems.

I write code all day every day. I use Copilot and the like all day every day (for me, in the medical imaging software field), and all day every day it is incredibly useful and writes nearly exactly the code I would have written, but faster. And none of it appears anywhere else; I've checked.