Isn't RAG essentially the "something small you can bolt on" to an LLM that gives it "persistence outside the context window?" There's no reason you can't take the output of an LLM and stuff it into a vector database. And, if you ask it to create a plan to do a thing, it can do that. So, there you have it: goal-oriented persistence outside of the context window.

I don't claim that RAG + LLM = AGI, but I do think it takes you a long way toward goal-oriented, autonomous agents with at least a degree of intelligence.