In a way yes. I think general intelligence (consciousness in most animals) developed evolutionarily to manage a wide variety of sensory inputs and tasks, and to bridge the gaps between them.

As we develop more individual areas of AI, we will naturally start to combine them to create more powerful programs, such as Toolformer combining the strengths of LLMs and other models. Once we have these connections between capabilities, it should be easier to develop new models that learn these connections more deeply and can do more things.

Some of the things that set us apart from other animals are our incredible language and reasoning capabilities which allow us to understand and interact with an increasingly complex world and augment our capabilities with tools. The perceived understanding that LLMs display using only patterns in text is insane. Combine that with the pace of developments in Chain of Thought reasoning, use of Tools, other areas handling visuals, sound, and motion, and multimodal AI, and the path to AGI is becoming clearer than the vision of a MrBeast™ cataracts patient.