I'm not saying that they can't be more capable, I'm saying the guy can get a little overly excited about things which are hard to measure or quantify.
We're observing these systems and making up our own interpretations about how good they are at certain tasks, but it's not really easy to measure how much better or worse these things can be overall.
Your example about language translation is a good example of where these things aren't really "better", just different. I speak multiple languages and while these systems are fantastic, they can fail in ways a professional translator wouldn't and it doesn't seem to automatically know it failed and should fix itself.
The car example is also great because it again proves my point. We can easily measure a car and a person and workout a car is faster, but we can also see that a car can't walk. So it's faster but it;s also entirely different.
I'm saying the guy can get a little overly excited about things which are hard to measure or quantify.
Let's back this up a little bit. We've got Marvin Minksy who comes along and destroys the perceptron. Then we have decades of knowledge systems that go nowhere. All the while Geoff Hinton is tirelessly working on neural networks. Finally after decades of hard work the fruits of his labor are recognized with ImageNet.
And then a bunch of people in a comment section criticize the guy for getting "a little overly excited" about the stunning range of neural networks that validates his life's work.
I'm not saying that they can't be more capable, I'm saying the guy can get a little overly excited about things which are hard to measure or quantify.
We're observing these systems and making up our own interpretations about how good they are at certain tasks, but it's not really easy to measure how much better or worse these things can be overall.
Your example about language translation is a good example of where these things aren't really "better", just different. I speak multiple languages and while these systems are fantastic, they can fail in ways a professional translator wouldn't and it doesn't seem to automatically know it failed and should fix itself.
The car example is also great because it again proves my point. We can easily measure a car and a person and workout a car is faster, but we can also see that a car can't walk. So it's faster but it;s also entirely different.