I am disappointed with the number of errors and misconceptions in this piece. He presents machine learning (ML) as though it is the entirety of artificial intelligence (AI), bases his assessment of the field on a false dichotomy between the largely distinct groups of supervised &amp; unsupervised learning techniques, and unfairly reduces the achievements of AI down to &quot;pattern recognition&quot;.<p>AI and ML are not synonymous. They are related, and there is a great deal of overlap between them, but the fundamental goals and approaches are largely different. Machine learning is primarily interested in studying what you can learn from data - for some suitable definition of the word &quot;learn&quot;. Artificial intelligence is the more broadly defined problem of studying algorithms that exhibit or incorporate intelligent solutions to problems. That may involve data, or background knowledge, or domain assumptions, or a variety of other things. AI is about more than data - even as he observed that it is a sign of intelligence that humans do not require thousands of samples to learn.<p>The central challenge of AI is not in transitioning from supervised learning to &quot;general&quot; unsupervised learning (whatever that means). The techniques are different, and often used for different things. There is some overlap, and they are clearly related - but it is not at all accurate to conflate unsupervised learning with &quot;common sense&quot;. In broad strokes, supervised learning is about identifying features in the data that correspond to labels, while unsupervised learning is about identifying intrinsic features in the data. It sounds like he&#x27;s interested in bootstrapping supervised techniques, or perhaps transfer learning.<p>My first response: ugh...yet another famous and lauded geek icon wading into the subject of AI. At least this doesn&#x27;t seem to be in any way connected to all the Nick Bostrom garbage. But if I&#x27;m allowed some snark, perhaps if he wanted to be an AI expert he should have stayed in school... ;-)