Is superintelligent AI just around the corner, or just a sci-fi dream?

Are machines about to become smarter than humans? If you take the leaders of artificial intelligence companies at their word, their products mean that the coming decade will be quite unlike any in human history: a golden era of "radical abundance", where high-energy physics is "solved" and we see the beginning of space colonisation. But researchers working with today's most powerful AI systems are finding a different reality, in which even the best models are failing to solve basic puzzles that most humans find trivial, while the promise of AI that can "reason" seems to be overblown. So, whom should you believe? Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis, the CEOs of OpenAI and Google DeepMind, respectively, have both made recent claims that powerful, world-altering AI systems are just around the corner.