>> it's amazing they can do language at all. But research on that is just starting. Give it time. Not so. Academic work in natural language processing has been

>> it's amazing they can do language at all. But research on that is just starting. Give it time. Not so. Academic work in natural language processing has been very active for decades. Check out NL SOAR, which is an awesome attempt from the early 90s by top CS/AI scholars: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/soar/utc/nl/doc/nl-soar.html http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/soar/utc/nl/doc/nl-soar... In general, language processing has been an important motivator and funding source for AI work. Remember that US Navy Signals Intelligence funded Noam Chomsky's early work on syntax. When early advances in basic linguistic research alongside early advances in computer hardware made machine translation seem plausible, money poured in. And it's pouring in again (now from private industry too).