How close are AI systems to human-level intelligence? The Allen AI challenge.

With respect to artificial intelligence, some people are squarely in the "optimist" camp, believing that we are "nearly there" as far as producing human-level intelligence. Microsoft co-founder's Paul Allen has been somewhat more prudent: While we have learned a great deal about how to build individual AI systems that do seemingly intelligent things, our systems have always remained brittle--their performance boundaries are rigidly set by their internal assumptions and defining algorithms, they cannot generalize, and they frequently give nonsensical answers outside of their specific focus areas. So Allen does not believe that we will see human-level artificial intelligence in this century. But he nevertheless generously created a foundation aiming to develop such human-level intelligence, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence Science. The Institute is lead by Oren Etzioni who obviously shares some of Allen's "pessimistic" views.