> the thinking is that now all problems are going to be solvable
...and then failure and the "AI winter" for a generation after the initial promise had been discredited.
Where's that coming from? There's certainly been some important advances recently, but to claim that no progress was made is strange.
Just to give one blatant example, Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in 1997; Chinook had fully solved draughts (checkers) by 2007; TD-Gammon played backgrammon consistently at world champion level by 1995; two computer programs, JACK and WBRIDGE5 won five bridge championships between 2001-2007. All of those are 10 years older than AlphaGo/Zero and each has a very long history going back to the 1950's in the case of draughts AI [1].
You probably haven't hear dabout most of them because they were not advertised by a company with the media clout of Google or Facebook, but they were important successes that solved hard problems. There are many, many more results all over the AI bibliography.
And, just to settle this once and for all- this bibliography starts a lot earlier than 2012.
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[1] All that's in "AI: A Modern Approach", 3d ed.
What seems missing in a lot of these threads is the idea of "context", and I think that's where there's lots of room for innovation. Current voice-assistants work "okay" for single-sentence queries, but if the device doesn't understand (or if I fail to phrase things in a way that it's expecting), it doesn't ask clarifying questions, and it doesn't use past exchanges to inform future ones (beyond perhaps some voice training data). It also limits the kinds of things it can do by requiring that all of the necessary information be presented in one utterance. It also raises the "mental tax" on doing "real things" because I know I have to say a long phrase just right or start over, and that's sure to raise anyone's anxiety-levels...
They might work "okay" if you're native speaker. As ESL speaker with an accent, it's nowhere near close. It's a total PITA beyond "what time is it".