2016 might seem like the year of AI, but we could be getting ahead of ourselves

Unsupervised learning, by contrast, is much harder. It is best thought of as a continuum between (a) the entire system being one gigantic, autonomous, self-learning machine and (b) solving certain problems within a much larger system that also involves humans and supervised learning techniques. For many enterprise solutions we are very close to (b). For personal assistants like Siri, we are a little closer to (a), but even in such applications true autonomous AI is still quite far away. Imagine the amount of human intervention that will need to happen on the back-end, or how many special cases must be handled by editors or trainers in teaching the system.