If "all the hype" is a single HN question (not even an assertion) this counts as "over the top", then what would be an appropriate amount of discussion other than none at all?
Someone who probably isn't wholly uninformed asking if we're getting close to AGI this year is obviously a symptom rather than the cause of the hype. I mean, if we're working on Ray Kurzweil's Singularity is Near timescale, I'll be able to buy computational power equivalent to the human brain for $999 in three years' time. Still, Peter Diamindis did update that a couple of years ago by pushing that deadline out to 2025, so I guess at least I'll still be smarter than my next bottom-spec Macbook Air.
[1]C elegans is pretty trivial
It's not, though. It comes up over and over here, and often it's a link to an external article rather than an "Ask HN".
I also wish all of the sugar beverage hype would stop (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=coca%20cola&sort=byPopularity&...).
In order to accurately simulate a particular brain, we'd need the technology to (i) accurately read all the information encoded in a particular brain, which everything we know about the brain suggests depends on getting a snapshot of the state of 85 billion neurons - and chemical interactions of those neurons' constituent proteins - at a particular millisecond in time. (ii) manipulate matter (or write matter-simulating code) such that we duplicate the state of that brain at that time, and probably the associated body too, with sufficient accuracy for the biochemical reactions (or digital emulation of the biochemical reactions) continue to produce a patterns resembles the thought processes of the emulated brain in their outputs.
I don't think we need to invoke "magic" or vitalism or quantum brains to suggest that replicators capable of reproducing a particular state of a mind-bogglingly complex set of biochemical processes without significant information loss may not be a practical possibility in future. If anything, that sounds harder than achieving AGI or something approaching it via other means.
As for the hype about general AI, we're responding to a thread musing on whether we'll get "close" to achieving it this year.