What people mean by generalized and special AI is not consistent in the field, but everyone agrees that the current brand of AI driven by statistical learning techniques and large scale neural networks is far from explaining how even the simplest of nervous systems work. The key obstacle is adaptation. Several people believe that they've more or less solved the recognition problem. However, adaptation is a totally different thing. There are no tools in the current AI toolkit that we can use to make a robot that can go out unsupervised in the real world, do something useful and come back safely. Whereas even the Nematode C. elegans with only 302 neurons is remarkably flexible, it can forage for food, remember cues that prediction food, manage food resources, get away from danger or noxious stimuli etc. This allows it to survive quite well in a world that is constantly changing in unpredictable ways. This is the kind of intelligence that proponents of so called general AI want, and I agree we have a couple of major breakthroughs away.