Yes. We need more people like Langford and LeCun to push back on the AI hype. It's better for AI researchers to underpromise and overdeliver than the other way around. Otherwise we risk another "AI Winter," and that's no fun.

The challenge is that to approximately 99.99% of the seven billion people on this planet, including roughly every journalist, the recent progress made by AI researchers is indistinguishable from "magic."

When all those people try to reason about "magical things," they're bound to reach nonsensical conclusions and say nonsensical things. To them, debating on the promise of technologies like deep learning is a lot like debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.[1]

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[1] http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1008/did-medieval-s...