Please share more. You can't tease us like that and leave us hanging.
Here is another Google Talk (not really a recent development, though):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7704388615049492068...
He is claiming that is missing for computers to understand humans is common sense in the form of a big ontology (database of relations between entities). I don't really agree that this is right approach, but might be interesting for you nonetheless.
Doug Lenat claimed that in the 1980s and spent quite a while trying to build it (Cyc IIRC). What is different this time? ("We can do it now" is a perfectly reasonable answer.)
The talk is from 2005 and it also two years back since I watched it, so I am not confident to summarize it. I was quite impressed when I watched it for the first time, though. I reason I brought it up is more, like "see what you could do with an ontology", then "this is what it should look like" or "an ontology is all you need".
I like I said I mentioned Cyc more because it is interesting then anything else. However, I do believe words and local image parts are just cognitive concepts and they will eventually be handled using the same algorithms, see e.g. the Socher et.al. paper I referenced above.
However, I am not so sure how this fits together with planning and acting autonomously (which would fall under reinforcement learning). But I wasn't really talking about building strong AI, just building an AI which is strong enough to convince people it is human during a 30 minute conversation.