At the most fundamental level I want to know if AI can ever go sentient  or even remotely "understand" stuff as opposed to traversing through billions of "cat" pictures to eventually identify a cat  with 99.5% accuracy, only to miss interpret the jumbled sign board as a cat.,(reply>), @Zilvente Someday, perhaps may be we will with a different architecture. Definitely not with present methods of finding the local maxima or minima by back propagating a stochastic gradient descent.,(reply>), This was answered by Turing. If you can define "go sentient" or "understand", then AI will achieve that. The question is, can you?,(reply>), The short answer is NO, it never will. they call it artificial intelligence, but it's only imitation of intelligence.