Nah,this sounds like a modern remix of Japan’s Fifth Generation Computing project. They thought that by building large databases and with Prolog they would bring upon an AI renaissance.

Just hand waving some “distributed architecture” and trying to duct tape modules together won’t get us any closer to AGI.

The building blocks themselves, the foundation, has to be much better.

Arguably the only building block that LLMs have contributed is that we have better user intent understanding now; a computer can just read text and extract intent from it much better than before. But besides that, the reasoning/search/“memory” are the same building blocks of old, they look very similar to techniques of the past, and that’s because they’re limited by information theory / computer science, not by today’s hardware or systems.

Yep, the Attention mechanism in the Transformer arch is pretty good.

Probably need another cycle of similar breakthrough in model engineering before this more complex neural network gets a step function better.

Moar data ain’t gonna help. The human brain is the proof: it doesnt need the internet’s worth of data to become good (nor all that much energy).

Right.

We can certainly get much more utility out of current architectures with better engineering, as "agents" have shown, but to claim that AGI is possible with engineering alone is wishful thinking. The hard part is building systems that showcase actual intelligence and reasoning, that are able to learn and discover on their own instead of requiring exorbitantly expensive training, that don't hallucinate, and so on. We still haven't cracked that nut, and it's becoming increasingly evident that the current approaches won't get us there. That will require groundbreaking compsci work, if it's possible at all.