I've never 100% bought into the idea of the singularity. Yes, in concept sure - if we make a computer sufficiently smarter than us, it can then design a smarter successor and so on.

But in practice? What if there's an asymptotic limit to intelligence? ie. We can get really smart, but there's only so smart we can get. What if we just get faster?

You could set an average person a really hard math exam and maybe they'll get 50% correct over the course of 2hrs. What if all we get out of AI is a computer getting 50% correct in 2 seconds?

Anecdotally, this is also my general impression of the state of AI as it exists today. Our big advances are generally just making simple calculations much much faster than before. Deep blue, AlphaGo, Google Search, Deep Learning in general; it's not smarter, just faster.