About whether general object recognition was ever considered the holy grail of AI.
Has this happened?
Yes 62 (57%)Not sure 23 (21%)No 23 (21%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether general object recognition was ever considered the holy grail of AI.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
I - for what it is worth - would still say general object recognition, with the emphasis on general, is indeed the holy grail.
The ability to recognize objects like people do is not properly represented by current benchmarks. I can imagine that you can built a perfect robotic "bird spotter" but if you put that in a self-driving car I would not be surprised if it stops for something that's just a shadow, or if you put it on a humanoid it's unable to distinguish its own hand from that of its clone. Imagine two of them cleaning out the dishwasher. :-)
A lot of AI is still working only in lab conditions or restricted application domains. That's why I consider robots and cars so important in driving AI towards the "general" dimension.