AI today and tomorrow is mostly about curve fitting, not intelligence

As debates around AI's value continue, the risk of an AI winter is real. We need to level set what is real and what is imagined so that the next press release you see describing some amazing breakthrough is properly contextualized. Unquestionably, the latest spike of interest in AI technology using machine learning and the neuron-inspired deep learning is behind incredible advancements in many software categories. Achievements such as language translation, image and scene recognition and conversational UIs that were once the stuff of sci-fi dreams are now a reality. Even as software using AI-labeled techniques continues to yield tremendous improvements in most software categories, both academics and skeptical observers have observed that such algorithms fall far short of what can be reasonably considered intelligent.