<i>Until our current big data AI revolution, AI was one investment catastrophe after another.</i><p>Maybe from the point of view of the investors themselves, in most cases, if they were expecting a big, immediate financial return.  But the technology has been improving steadily (ish) throughout the years.  As AI people sometimes say &quot;AI is whatever computers can&#x27;t to $today&quot;.  That is, as soon as AI reaches a point where it can do something useful, people stop considering it AI.<p>I saw an example of this yesterday while having a conversation with somebody much younger than me (I&#x27;m 42) when we got on this topic.  I was saying that things like the voice recognition in that Google Now, Siri, Cortana (sp?), etc. use would be good examples of what would have been mind-blowing AI capabilities 20 or 30 years ago and he said &quot;Oh, that&#x27;s AI?&quot;<p>No, it&#x27;s not AI now, because now it&#x27;s common-place.  :-)<p>Of course, none of that is to say that we aren&#x27;t still a long way away from a true &quot;AGI&quot;.  But AI research has been yielding useful techniques for quite a long time, even if we didn&#x27;t get &quot;there yet&quot; for AGI.