I disagree with you.
> Essentially all we've done is pushed the basic model proposed by linear regression to it's absolutely limits
No, we haven't pushed linear regression to its limits. If it was only linear regression, it wouldn't work. Neural networks need a non-linearity to model complex things.
The beauty is that given an infinite series of nonlinearities, one can model any mathematical function. In practice we found it takes much less than "infinite", a handful will already get you a long way.
A stack of this basic building block, as you describe it, is really all it takes - we know that mathematically already. The interesting question is: how complex are the functions we need to model? So if we create a neural network of a certain size, is that size large enough to model the problem space?
> However we are only near AGI if this is in fact how intelligence works (or can work) and I don't believe we've seen any evidence of this. And there are some very big assumptions baked into this approach.
I think ChatGPT is good evidence of this. What evidence do we have that this isn't how intelligence works?