Human-Level Intelligence or Animal-Like Abilities?

Yet the combination of these factors created a milestone in AI history, as it had a profound impact on real-world applications and the successful deployment of various AI techniques that have been in the works for a very long time, particularly neural networks.g I shared these remarks in various contexts during the course of preparing this article. The audiences ranged from AI and computer science to law and public-policy researchers with an interest in AI. What I found striking is the great interest in this discussion and the comfort, if not general agreement, with the remarks I made. I did get a few "I beg to differ" responses though, all centering on recent advancements relating to optimizing functions, which are key to the successful training of neural networks (such as results on stochastic gradient descent, dropouts, and new activation functions). The objections stemmed from not having named them as breakthroughs (in AI). My answer: They all fall under the enabler I outlined earlier: "increasingly sophisticated statistical and optimization techniques for fitting functions." Follow up question: Does it matter that they are statistical and optimization techniques, as opposed to classical AI techniques?