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I spent the last two days in IBMs Watson Innovation Centre, working with the Watson Conversation APIs. To say I was not impressed is putting it mildly. Can you name any examples where Watson is good?

>> The so-called AI as pursued by Google & other tech companies isn't AI at all. True AI won't need as much data.

>Deepmind / AlphaGo, Watson, and other like them are about the best thing we have nowadays when it comes to AI. Let's not even talk about True AI, which if you take any of the definitions can only become reality with so much data we're only brushing on it actually. Saying True AI won't need as much data is failing to understand how much "data" it takes to make a human brain function, and while that is a whole other can of worm, one thing is certain it's a shit load accumulated over time.

I think you and I are saying the same thing. Namely, intelligence is an accumulation of years of experience, information & data (though human sensory system). But, once intelligence is established (say after 21 yrs of training in case of humans), learning is rather easy (i.e. one shot learning is sufficient to accomplish new, mundane tasks). You don't need to know someone's whole browsing history and emails to make personalized recommendations or to give intelligent answers to queries. The more intelligent the algorithm, presumably, the less personalized data it needs. So when it comes to true AI, you don't need to know as much about the user to help. This is one way to rationalize Apple's approach.

All the examples you've given are either still very academic or just marketing for 'clever algorithms'. The whole idea that one company or another is owning 'AI' is mainly analyst and marketing words - anything that moves over into practice and actual use just gets callled 'technology'.