LLMs in some form will likely be a key component in the first AGI system we (help) build. We might still lack something essential. However, people who keep doubting AGI is even possible should learn more about The Church-Turing Thesis.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/church-turing/

AGI is definitely possible - there is nothing fundamentally different in the human brain that would surpass a Turing machine's computational power (unless you believe in some higher powers, etc).

We are just meat-computers.

But at the same time, there is absolutely no indication or reason to believe that this wave of AI hype is the AGI one and that LLMs can be scaled further. We absolutely don't know almost anything about the nature of human intelligence, so we can't even really claim whether we are close or far.

This is a long read on things most people here know at least in some form. Could you pint to a particular fragment or a quote?