The AI of today is not so drastically different from the AI of our academic grandfathers; what's changed is our ability to scale up to larger and larger versions of the same searching and sorting problems. Certainly there are worrying implications in this; machines that are able to parse and sift through very large data sets present all kinds of headaches for privacy and safety but let's not kid oursevles: there's nothing intelligent here. Tomorrow's AI is almost certainly going to be just a better version of today's AI; i.e very fast and dumb as a bag of hammers.
[1] The exception is when researchers need to sell their wares to funding bodies and the media. It is much easier to impress upon the lay person an idea involving "intelligent machines" than it is to explain what we actually do.
Also, I'm sympathetic to Roberto's point about how the brain works; I definitely agree that there is no magic; it might just be a few stupid mathematical tricks layered all the way down.
Not even out of the gate and already reaching for an ad-hominem. You must be fun at parties.
> What do the top researchers think?
The same thing. Except when they're in front of a camera. Then they get all stupid and start talking about machines being on the cusp of taking over. This phenomenon can be observed all the way back to the origins of AI. After the interview is over these same researchers go back into the lab and are once again searching and sorting.
> There is a lot of work on combining graphical models with logic, for example Pedro Domingos' work, the goal is clearly machine reasoning.
I feel there is a difference between automated reasoning and intelligence. All current AI is just machines imbued with human insight and (often, especially in the most effective cases) domain-specific knowledge. These efforts manifest as search and sort techniques that allow said machines to analyse facts and propagate information in order to select from myriad possible actions. There is no intelligence here except that which we provide. It's all smoke and mirrors. We don't even know what intelligence is; how can we aspire to replicate it? AI researchers are, by-and-large, just Computer Scientists. Not biologists, not psychologists; just guys and gals working with ever more elaborate Turing Machines. The algorithms they come up with are without exception dumb dumb dumb.
> Google paid 10M per head for DeepMind guys, explicitly working on AGI
Please. DeepMind is just a startup based on (among other things) David Silver's work into reinforcement learning. Google is not interested in these guys because they want intelligent machines; they just want automatons to better sift through reams of data in order to make recommendations and better sell you crap you do not need.
I think you misunderstood; I did not mean you're an average researcher - I have no idea - but unless you hang our with hotshots at AI/ML conferences (which is a bit of a club) you're hanging out with average researchers.
There are good indications now that brains work repeating a simple probabilistic algorithm in a multilevel fashion. Intelligence is not a magic property, but a kind of "searching and sorting".
" It is much easier to impress upon the lay person an idea involving "intelligent machines" than it is to explain what we actually do."
In my opinion, the opposite is actually true. No serious researcher want to be associated with those freaks that are waiting for the end of the world. They have a reputation that they need for making a living.