You're exactly right. If you look closely, present day A.I is modeled after the cortex. It's akin to cutting out the neo-cortex, wiring in i/o hooks, and reprogramming it to one's needs (weak A.I).

The cortical regions are good at creating hierarchical feature maps and we had a bunch of search algorithms laying around in the parts bin. Presto : Present day A.I.

This approach meshes well with 'big-data' companies in possession of large compute stacks and data-sets. So, its the direction things went.

A perfect opportunity for disruption.. The current wave is on borrowed time.