How Smart Is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has come a long way in recent years. For example, AI has defeated the human world champion of Go, recreated the periodic table of elements, enabled self-driving vehicles, identifed crop diseases, and predicted depression from speech. Imagine what could happen as AI improves capabilities in areas that are squarely in the domain of the human brain. Today, technology is far from achieving parity with human-level intelligence, also known as "strong AI" or artificial general intelligence (AGI). Recent AI advances in one capability--pattern recognition--has spawned an investment gold rush for AI startups and machine learning talent from venture capital, corporations, and governments who have recognized the potential competitive advantage.