I see, as many others may, that currently we are living in a NN (Neural Networks) renaissance. They are not as good as one may wish them to be, in fact sometimes they seem quite funny.
Still, after some unexpected advances from the last year onward, they look quite unstoppable to me. Further advances are plausible and their applications in playing the Go game for example, can bring us some very interesting advances and achievements. Even some big surprise is possible here.
A month ago I touched on this topic in "The Brain as a Universal Learning Machine". I intend to soon write a post or two specifically focusing on near term predictions for the future of DL AI leading to AGI. My main counterintuitive point is that the brain is actually not that powerful at all at the circuit level.
You are not alone. I think NNs are definitely the best approach to AI, and recent progress is quite promising. They have had a lot of success on a number of different AI tasks. From machine vision to translation to video game playing. They are extremely general purpose.
Here's a recent quote from Schmidhuber (who I personally believe is most likely to create AGI.)
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