Artificial general intelligence was a phrase invented to draw distinction from “narrow intelligence” which are algorithms that can only be applied to specific problem domains. E.g. Deep Blue was amazing at playing chess, but couldn’t play Go much less prioritize a grocery list. Any artificial program that could be applied to arbitrary tasks not pre-trained on is AGI. ChatGPT and especially more recent agentic models are absolutely and unquestionably AGI in the original definition of the term.

Goalposts are moving though. Through the efforts of various people in the rationalist-connected space, the word has since morphed to be implicitly synonymous with the notion of superintellgence and self-improvement, hence the vague and conflicting definitions people now ascribe to it.

Also, fwiw the training process behind the generation of an LLM is absolutely able to discover new and novel ideas, in the same sense that Kepler’s laws of planetary motion were new and novel if all you had were Tycho Brache’s astronomical observations. Inference can tease out these novel discoveries, if nothing else. But I suspect also that your definition of creative and novel would also exclude human creativity if it were rigorously applied—our brains after all are merely remixing our own experiences too.