AI is making progress, but it's unlikely to succeed anytime soon in one key area

It will take time, but at some point every application will have its share of "AI Inside." Today, however, we're far from that point, and false advertising of AI capabilities isn't helping, something Arvind Narayanan, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Princeton, has called out as "snake oil" in a recent presentation. It's not that there aren't real, useful ways to employ AI today, he stresses, but rather that "Much of what's being sold as'AI' today is snake oil--it does not and cannot work." To help parse good from bad AI advertising, where does Narayanan believe we're making real progress in AI, and where should we myth bust? As with any new technology, aspirations to embrace it always outpace actual production usage, and AI is no different. Even so, according to a Gartner study released earlier in 2019, 59% of enterprises surveyed are using AI today and, of that 59%, they have, on average, four AI/ML projects deployed.