I understand that most people working with deep learning wouldn't want this type of thinking to spread amongst the public, and I surely don't want it either.
But you have to be totally unaware of reality to think that DL is
the
definitive tool for AI.
Most impressive results in DL in the past 2 years happended like this:
>deepmind steals people from the top ML research teams in univerisites around the world
>these people are given an incredible amount of money to solve an incredibly complex task
>a 6000 layers deep network is run for 6 months on a GPU cluster the size of Texas
>Google drops in their marketing team
>media says Google solved the AI problem
>repeat every 6 months to keep the company hot and keep the people flow constant
>get accepted at every conference on earth because you're deepmind (seriously, have you seen the crap that they get to present at NIPS and ICML? The ddqn paper is literally a single line modification to another paper's algorithm, while we plebeians have to struggle like hell to get the originality points)
I'll be impressed when they solve Pacman on a Raspberry Pi, otherwise they are simply grownups playing with very expensive toys.
Deep learning is cool, I truly believe that, and I love working with neural networks, but anyone with a base knowledge of ML knows better than to praise it as the saviour of AI research.
Rant over, I'm gonna go check how my autoencoder is learning now ;)