Frontier AI: How far are we from artificial "general" intelligence, really?

Another related area that has seen considerable acceleration is reinforcement learning – a technique where the AI teaches itself how to do something by trying again and again, separating good moves (that lead to rewards) from bad ones, and altering its approach each time, until it masters the skill. Reinforcement learning is another technique that goes back as far as the 1950s, and was considered for a long time an interesting idea that didn't work well. However, that all changed in late 2013 when DeepMind, then an independent startup, taught an AI to play 22 Atari 2600 games, including Space Invaders, at a superhuman level. In 2016, its AlphaGo, an AI trained with reinforcement learning, beat the South Korean Go master Lee Sedol. Then just a few months ago in December 2017, AlphaZero, a more generalized and powerful version of AlphaGo used the same approach to master not just Go, but also chess and shogi. Without any human guidance other than the game rules, AlphaZero taught itself how to play chess at a master level in only four hours.