All of that is completely fair and I am not debating your well-made points.

My issue are a few things in particular:

- Recent evidence that most AI papers are approved by underground rings of peer reviews -- either on the principle of "you approve my paper, I'll approve yours" or because the authors know each other from university. That story was even posted here on HN several months ago.

- Any progress that the outside public sees is really small.

- Any non-small progress is never noticed by the general public. It's captured by a corporation because some deluded board member who never worked an hour in their life imagines that the company's small AI breakthrough will definitely hand them the keys to ruling the entire planet, I suppose. One example coming to mind: translation software. Why doin't we have that yet?! There are literal decades of research and some of the FAANG corporations bragged on their blogs, several times, that they almost solved it (Microsoft I think). All of the public-facing translation software packages are rather mediocre. Also, why don't we have publicly accessible and shareable NNs trained with millions of self-driving travels? Etc.

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> I think it's the fault of the media that "AI" appears as this single conceptual blur

Many here on HN -- me included -- have the confidence to think they are not influenced by mainstream media on such topics. I personally got hyped for computers at 11-12 y/o partly due to the charmingly goofy but ambitious 90s sci-fi movies but now, almost 30 years later, I am not seeing that progress you speak about.

> The "comfy well-funded bro-club corner" (why so much envy in the phrasing?)

You deciphered it perfectly. It's envy, not going to deny the obvious. I am not making half-bad money at all but I have heard some insane numbers -- like $30k+ a month for being an AI researcher! -- and I in the meantime have to prove to my team leader that I am not completely useless even though I was recruited on the clear condition that most of what the company is working with is new to me and I'll need months to catch up. And I get times less salary. I admit I am envious of people who get to (a) do exploratory work and (b) be very handsomely rewarded for it.

I think even with that there's a good feedback that AI workers can extract from my rant: you guys are extremely privileged. Even more than a lot of programmers / sysadmins (who are already quite privileged compared to many other people).

> It is capable of a lot more than 1-2 decades ago.

There's no ill intent behind the next phrase: I am honestly not seeing it anywhere. As a very pragmatic (and aging) programmer I'll believe it when my dishwasher can reach for the dishes and cutlery in the sink and load them by itself. I'll believe it when I can leave a robot at home while taking a walk with my wife and return to a spick-and-span-clean apartment.

Which brings me to...

> If you just read the "AI" comment sections on HN it may seem everybody is just training a cat/dog classifier in Keras on ImageNet and nothing new is going on.

I am not denying that I do the same and I am likely judging this through not getting enough information. But my general intention isn't to be extremely well informed on what's happening in the area; it is more about asking the question "okay, fine, but WHEN will what you are working on be ACTUALLY useful, even a little bit, out there?".

I can see how many don't like having that question asked to them and so I guess people like me and an average AI researcher would never have a productive discussion. Damn shame. :(