We are getting very close to the capability to build von Neuman probes though, so I'm not sure an o sky is evidence for a late filter.
I am highly skeptical of this statement.
We haven't built a machine that can get out of our solar system and land on a planet in another.
We haven't made machines that can copy themselves terrestrially.
Making something that can get out of the solar system, land on another planet, then make (multiple) copies of itself seems huge leap beyond either of the other two issues.
Even an AGI that could self-replicate might have enormous difficulty getting to another planet and turning its raw resources into copies of itself.
But an AGI wouldn't be an AGI if it wasn't able to figure out how to solve the problem of getting from here to there and using in-situ resources to replicate itself. I hate to make arguments from definitions, but that's kinda the case here. If an intelligence can't solve that solvable problem, it really isn't a general intelligence now is it?
So how far are we from making an (UF)AGI? 15 years? 50 years? 100 years? That's still a cosmic blink in the eye.
An Article on Motherboard reports about Alien Minds by Susan Schneider who claiThe Dominant Life Form In the Cosmos Is Probably Superintelligent Robots. The article is crosslinked to other posts about superintelligence and at the end discusses the question why these alien robots leave us along. The arguments puts forth on this don't convince me though.