I had to look up MegaHal, apparently that was based at least in part on a hidden Markov Model.
Using "it" in this way to refer to both that and GPT-family LLMs, or similarly saying "I remember being shown this software almost a decade ago" like the other commenter, is like saying "I remember seeing Kitty Hawk fly, and there's no way that can get someone across the Atlantic" when being presented with a chance to a free seat on the first flight of the Concord. (Actual human level intelligence in this analogy is a spaceship we still have not built, that's not where I'm going with this).
It’s not clear to me MegaHAL language models are less powerful than transformer models. The difference is the “largeness”, but that’s a hardware/dataset/budget detail.
To be fair, the post might be from Schmidhuber, in which case it’s true he saw it 20 years ago.
I saw it 10 years ago and it was called MegaHAL, wasn’t this good though.