I think we get the impression at times that no matter what there is always an army of people quietly working away on this stuff and as time passes it will get b

I think we get the impression at times that no matter what there is always an army of people quietly working away on this stuff and as time passes it will get better and better. The article Jeff linked talks about how how the performance has pretty much levelled off except for small incremental improvements and most of the money and research was shifted away from the area. I guess the trend will continue, gaining small improvements through applying more and more data as training for current methods until someone comes up with a completely different approach to push it forward.