His prediction is that a machine will pass the turing test in 2029.

And yes, there's evidence of incredible machine learning discoveries all around us. You'd have to be willfully blind not to see those. AlphaZero in Go & Chess, the protein folding miracles of Deepmind, all the amazing work being done today. The field is racing ahead. Human minds are good at seeing linear progression. Our brains aren't particularly good at exponential growth, which is what is happening in this field.