All these companies are doing now is taking an existing inferencing engine, making it 3% faster, 3% more accurate, etc. per quarter, fighting over the $20/month users
One can imagine product is now taking the wheel from engineering and are building ideas on how to monetize the existing engine. Thats essentially what GPT-4o is, and who knows what else is in the 1,2,3 year roadmaps for any of these $20 companies
To reach true AGI we need to get past guessing, and that doesn't seem close at all. Even if one of these companies gets better at making you "feel" like its understanding and not guessing, if it isnt actually happening, its not a breakthrough
Now with product leading the way, its really interesting to see where these engineers head
"Just" guessing the next token requires understanding. The fact that LLMs are able to respond so intelligently to such a wide range of novel prompts means that they have a very effective internal representation of the outside world. That's what we colloquially call "understanding."
This results in the appearance of an arms race between world model refinement and user cleverness, but it's really a fundamental expressive limitation: the user can always recurse, but the model can only predict tokens.
(There are a lot of contexts in which this distinction doesn't matter, but I would argue that it does matter for a meaningful definition of human-like understanding.)