&gt; Since no one understands how general unsupervised learning actually works, we&#x27;re quite a ways off from building the general AIs you see in movies.<p>This statement is a contradiction in terms. If we do not understand how something works, it is impossible to estimate how far off it is.<p>You can only estimate the distance of discovery when it is inherently incremental, but since we really have no idea how to do general unsupervised learning, it&#x27;s entirely possible that it consists of a single, brilliant algorithmic insight. Nobody could have estimated how far off the airplane was before the Wright brothers invented it, similarly with cars, or for a more recent and concrete example, a quasipolynomial time algorithm for graph isomorphism.