The ARC-AGI-3 scorecard is extremely misleading given that it clearly states itself that "with [the responses API] harness, we estimate Sol would score in the ballpark of ~30%." but it shows a score of 7.8% for GPT-5.6 Sol presumably since if they updated the percentage for GPT-5.6 Sol to the score it would receive with the responses API harness they used for GPT-6 Astra they'd have to do the same for the percentage…
Machines can certainly recognize patterns and achieve goals through brute force trial and error. They can also use the results of previous iterations to change their behavior in future iterations, which we could call learning. I wouldn’t necessarily say they are good at brand new situations, but there has definitely been progress.
However, last I checked, a seemingly very intelligent LLM still struggles to play Chess at a basic level, let alone drive a robot or other non-language tasks. Its architecture and ability to learn seem a long way off from being general.
Vision models, being able to encompass language and much more, seem to me like a theoretically closer step to AGI. Yet, there is a lot more to the world than just what we can see.
On the other hand, in humans, vision certainly is not necessary for intelligence. So there is something more fundamental, neither vision nor language, that high levels of intelligence are based upon. Once we figure that out, I think we will be able to build AGI.