The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks
The thing about neural nets is that they are pretty opaque from an analyst point of view.  It's hard to figure out why they do what they do, except that they have been trained to optimize a particular cost function.  I think Strong AI will never happen because the people in charge will not give control over to a system that makes important decisions without explaining why.  They will certainly not give control over the cost function to a strong AI because control of determination of the cost function is the axis upon which all power will rest.