AI is still several breakthroughs away from reality

While the growth of deep neural networks has helped propel the field of machine learning to new heights, there's still a long road ahead when it comes to creating artificial intelligence. That's the message from a panel of leading machine learning and AI experts who spoke at the Association for Computing Machinery's Turing Award Celebration conference in San Francisco today. He said that applications using neural nets are essentially faking true intelligence but that their current state allows for interesting development. "Some of these domains where we're faking intelligence with neural nets, we're faking it well enough that you can build a company around it," Jordan said. Those comments come at a time of increased hype for deep learning and artificial intelligence in general, driven by interest from major technology companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon.