Simulating "the brain" for any non trivial brain[1] sounds even harder than simulating "a brain" (or creating AI in some non-brain-resembling form) since it would appear to imply identifying what the billions of constituent parts of a brain do well enough to
generalise rather than merely
copy patterns of brain function.
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
