Gary Marcus

always easy to bash AI. There is no 'barrier' it's a continuous spectrum. AI is steadily incrementing its understanding of 'meaning' of various things. True there is a long way to go though. But hiding behind an imaginary 'barrier' isn't going to help us in the end.

Not much imaginary about causal and complex reasoning. For many people, AI="deep learning", and that technique has well documented issues, as @GaryMarcus has been delighting in pointing out. ...

That's exactly what they said about Go. Required intuition and long term planning. No brute force or simple algo could do it without understanding complex modeling of opponents' intentions.

Fair call, and therein lies the trap. Solving go was/is a massive achievement and demonstrates brute force success on that class of problems. It doesn't mean that all problems are amenable to that particular hammer.

On the contrary, I don't think DeepMind characterizes alpha zero as brute force. It it quickly develops an understanding of the problem at super human level without trying even a tiny fraction of the possibilities.

Albeit still using a ton of computation; depends on your definition. The point about hammers and nails holds, either way.

Well clearly the human brain uses an enormous amount of computation to develop an understanding of the game of go at professional levels. This is not a mark against intelligence or understanding.