Are we making great, amazing advances in pattern recognition, mechanical systems that very cleverly incorporate sensor feedback, and other novel areas? Sure. Are we making super-impressive progress in general intelligence. No.

There's two main fields of thought - one that "general intelligence" is some unified, centralized system, maybe a "symbolic system"; another that "general intelligence" is merely the composition of a bunch of pieces that do certain stuff.

So maybe our advancement in the things you mentioned are making strides towards the latter. I think that's wrong, but it's possible. Even if it is the case, we're still not making strides in the pieces of that composed intelligence that answer questions like - what's bigger, a shoebox or a mountain?

In regards to your bird analogy: we don't have very popular bird machines, but we do know the principles that enable birds to fly. Similarly, we don't need to build brains, but anything we build that is comparably "intelligent" as a brain would be quite surprising if it didn't come from insight we have into the principles that enable general intelligence.