The actual results of AIs in the last fews aren't matching the scale of investment or hype. That isn't to say there haven't been useful results, but overall investors aren't making a return on their investments (and there is no prospect of that in the short term) and at some point they'll lose patience and find something else to invest in.

> Do you have some secret insights into the mechanisms of general intelligence that you aren't sharing with the class?

I do know that "natural intelligence" (as found in the brains of humans and other animals) uses orders of magnitude more computing power than even our largest compute clusters, that such intelligences have been trained over millennia, (and in the case of humans, each instance is incrementally refined over the course of 10+ years), and that even those intelligences are not as good as classical computers at some tasks (people make mistakes, and a hypothetical AGI likely would too).

Perhaps we'll find some secret that allows us to shortcut that, but I suspect the idea that such a discovery is just around corner is just hubris.