AI is kind of a "loaded" term. It's clear that none of the AI or machine learning systems we have today demonstrates the kind of self-aware intelligence that human beings are capable of. However, AI is definitely getting better at solving problems that involve recognizing patterns and finding algorithms that are not hand-coded into the system by a human programmer.
In many cases the AI algorithm gets better at solving problems in specific domains than the top human experts. AlphaZero is a great example of this. It learned to play Chess, Go, and Shogi better than any human, on its own, without using any heuristics or human games. The thing to note here is that the AI in this case develops an exquisitely precise positional analysis. In other words, it is able to make the kinds of judgements that are characteristic of human intuition.
AI is kind of a "loaded" term. It's clear that none of the AI or machine learning systems we have today demonstrates the kind of self-aware intelligence that human beings are capable of. However, AI is definitely getting better at solving problems that involve recognizing patterns and finding algorithms that are not hand-coded into the system by a human programmer.
In many cases the AI algorithm gets better at solving problems in specific domains than the top human experts. AlphaZero is a great example of this. It learned to play Chess, Go, and Shogi better than any human, on its own, without using any heuristics or human games. The thing to note here is that the AI in this case develops an exquisitely precise positional analysis. In other words, it is able to make the kinds of judgements that are characteristic of human intuition.
For reference, the paper The Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution: A Collection of Anecdotes from the Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Life Research Communities is really interesting. Also, see DeepMind's paper about AlphaZero, Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm.
I also wrote an article here called AlphaGo: Observations about Machine Intelligence.