If there are 100 facts that indicate a coming AI winter, and Brin just talks up the 15 facts that indicate AI's unalloyed dominance, that's definitely biased.

Second, I'm not quite sure that's how it works. Like in mathematics, if your lemma is X, you can give a 100 examples of X being true, but I only need a single counter-example to break it.

In my opinion a single valid modern use-case of AI is enough to show that we're not in an AI winter. By definition an AI winter means that nothing substantial is coming out of AI for a long period of time, yet Brin listed that Google alone has had a dozen in the past few years.

You cannot ask a generic question, then attack the answer based on absence of evidence for a specific example.

>translate over 100 languages in Google Translate;

>caption over a billion videos in 10 languages on YouTube;

barely even work. Yeah, it's a difficult problem but it's not even close to being solved.

Google's captioning works well when people speak clearly and in English. Google translate works well when you translate well written straightforward text into English. It's impressive but it's got a long way to go to reach human grade transcription and translation.

I think when evaluating these things people underestimate how long the tail of these problems is. It's always those pesky diminishing returns. I think it's true for many AI problems today, for instance it looks like current self-driving car tech manages to handle, say, 95% of situations just fine. Thing is, in order to be actually usable you want something that critical to reach something like 99.999% success rate and bridging these last few percent might prove very difficult, maybe even impossible with current tech.

Every time I activate it I am in for a good laugh more than anything actually useful.

    Have now, ah! Philosophy,
    Law and medicine,
    And unfortunately also theology
    Thoroughly studied, with great effort.
    Here I am, I poor gate!
    And I'm as smart as before

It's unable to 'understand' that 'I poor gate' makes no sense at all.

Google Translate is the 'poor gate'.

You may think that you can now read German news, but in fact you would not know if the sentence meaning has been preserved in the English translation. The words itself might look as if the sentence makes sense - but the meaning is actually shifted - slight differences, but also possibly the complete opposite.

The translation also does not give you any indication where this might be and where the translation is based on weak training material or where there is some inference needed for a successful translation.