About whether AI hype in 2016 was overblown compared to real NLP progress.
Has this happened?
Yes 86 (72%)Not sure 9 (8%)No 25 (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 AI hype in 2016 was overblown compared to real NLP progress.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Well said. One thing to point though, NLP leans towards the understanding of the semantic meaning of a sentence, while the article you referred here talks about speech recognition, which focuses on primarily audio to text.
Comparing to speech recognition, NLP currently doesn't enjoy the same level of success by adapting DL technique, AFAIK. By success, I mean parity with human level performance. Current techniques are far from understanding reasonably complex commands/requirement expressed in everyday language and react to it correspondingly.
IMHO, this is as hard as solving the AGI problem itself. Having a chatbot that people can talk to without realizing it is AI or not, is practically indistinguishable from mastering true intelligence, as is defined by Turing Test.