Absolutely. AGI isn't a matter of adding more 9s. It's a matter of solving more "???"s. And those require not just work but also a healthy serving of luck.

As I understand it, to the breadth of LLMs was also something that was stumbled on kinda by accident, I understand they got developed as translators and were just 'smarter' than expected.

Also, to understand the world you don't need language. People don't think in language. Thought is understanding. Language is knowledge transfer and expression.