Artificial intelligence is a prototype intelligence that will eventually, when built correctly, reach the singularity. Well not really... marketing and business corps wish for that to be true by blatently lying, claiming Artificial Generalized Intelligence is just around the corner. Its an obvious attempt at marketing, otherwise science would be telling us about it. People forget that tech isn't some random magic that you can call upon to create something, technology is iterative steps that eventually will result in a breakthrough. Before LLMs went into the mainstream we already had years of less functional chat bots who could create vaguely something. Eventually when Corps could create good enough text for people to not have explicit problems with text LLMs became popular; Because humans regularly follow psuedoscience and other weird beliefs so long as they are credible enough to believe. Its a similar phenomenon as with animal intelligence, where animals are intelligent not in what they themselves can do or think but in what human-like behaviors they can exhibit (although animals are treated poorly if they are trained while AI are exempt from this). The difference between an animal communcating versus creating art is the same as Machine Learning versus LLMs and Video Generators.
One annoying thing about LLMs and Image/Video Generation Bots is how they've taken the two different techs and squished them together. Then added additional things like OCR, Translation , Image Recognition, Medicine research, Data processing, Artificial Voices, and other such tech and taken them in as major improvements in "AI" despite them being different products made years before LLMs came onto the scene. All of this stuff that was previously labeled as Machine Learning turned into AI improvements because LLMs could create text well enough to lie and pretend to be a proto-intelligent lifeform. I wonder how much of the pro-AI general public is well informed enough to have known about Machine Learning before LLMs though.
If we have the neccessary steps to create AGI we wouldn't be asking when it will be a thing. Every industry has a hype man whose sole purpose is to say "[product] will happen by 20XX". When I was in middle school my science teacher would pull up some tech news, showing claims on electric and self driving cars would be everywhere by 2015, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20. We're at the year 2025 and they've made functional electric cars that are somewhat popular and self-driving cars are still in the testing phases or routinely in accidents (although admittedly some are caused by humans and we'd be in a better state will full self-driving).
"Ai Music has reached the top of [platform] charts" they say, omitting that bots were already known to infest any platform that you can generate money on. So much of AI is just stuff we don't need or is actively harmful for anything else. We're replacing reliable creative work with whatever weird computer stuff it generated for us. Its weird how much random AI stuff has been generated on the internet, not as an explicit attack to swarm the web with misinformation, but to be a low effort product stamped on products to small profits or as a cost saving measure. When people used to want to make low effort products they'd either need to steal the works of others or outsource their work in markets with cheap labor, now the bar for creating images or text has been reduced to nothing. We've created a machine that spits out well made phrases in a unplanned order, which makes it useless. However to the untrained eye it might as well be a masterpiece. Our previous systems either had obvious issues that people would be able to see and fix or had you learn a skill in the process, its just annoying how well people can be tricked through good presentation more than anything.