I don't think that quote from Carmack represents some deeply considered conclusion. He started off his efforts with embodiment. He either never considered LLMs a path towards AGI, or thought he didn't personally have anything to contribute to LLMs (he talked about it early on in his journey but I don't remember the specifics). He didn't spend a year investigating LLMs and then decide that they weren't the path to AGI. The point is that he has no special insight regarding LLMs relationship to AGI and its misleading to imply that his current effort towards building AGI that eschew LLMs is an expert opinion.
Yes, I meant to say that, for Carmack, no type of modern AI research has figured out the path to actual general intelligence. I just didn't want to use the meaningless "AI" buzzword, and these days all the focus and money is on large language models, especially when talking about the end goal of AGI.
