I see people saying that these kinds of things are happening behind closed doors, but I haven't seen any convincing evidence of it, and there is enormous propensity for AI speculation to run rampant.
As others have pointed out in other threads RLHF has progressed beyond next-token prediction and modern models are modeling concepts [1].
[0] https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...
[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/tracing-thoughts-language-mod...
Intelligence as humans have it seems like a "know it when you see it" thing to me, and metrics that attempt to define and compare it will always be looking at only a narrow slice of the whole picture. To put it simply, the gut feeling I get based on my interactions with current AI, and how it is has developed over the past couple of years, is that AI is missing key elements of general intelligence at its core. While there's more lots more room for its current approaches to get better, I think there will be something different needed for AGI.
I'm not an expert, just a human.