Its very hard to say as no one can really predict when a research drought will come unless you actually do the research. Though I must say that most of the ML r

Its very hard to say as no one can really predict when a research drought will come unless you actually do the research. Though I must say that most of the ML researchers I've come across aren't directly concerned with AGI. (either they outright dont care, or they think its a step by step thing) If AI winter comes it's probably because of disappointment of progress due to misunderstanding/misalignment with the general public / rich investors, so now you know who to blame. The state of cognitive science right now is basically a bunch of scientists saying: "yeah to be honest I have no idea really how the mind does this, but if you ignore the edge cases then this model I have here works pretty well". But it also seems to be that those edge cases are where human cognition truly shines. (ex. naturalized categorization, metaphor in language, novel problem solving) There is some progress, but at this stage its unclear how to import the philosophical discussions to an actual theory. I'll add that it's very easy to be an "amateur cognitive scientist" because you just need some self-awareness to be able to construct some folk theory of the mind that works most of the time. But a model that "kinda works" isn't going to cut it for AGI because eventually as you push it down the line further your misalignment will get worse and worse. AGI would probably need some massive conceptual breakthrough in cognitive science and not in computational methods (though they are obviously interrelated) cf: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUjc1WuyPT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUjc1WuyPT8 (tbh I haven't read the bottom two, but I personally never thought that modern NN methods can achieve AGI, so I didn't bother to read their rationale asides from a skim) https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/02/21/strong-ai-isnt-here-yet/ https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2017/02/21/strong-ai-isnt... https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.00289 https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.00289 I am: a cognitive science student that has /some/ understanding in recent ML methods P.S. Still, my dream to be an AGI researcher! I have 0 prior experience but if someone out there is reading is also doing AGI research or something similar, contact me! I have absolutely no official credentials I must add however.