Well, I think this is simply a matter of how you see AI. The colloquial understanding of AI is something that is able to generally "think" like a human. To them

Well, I think this is simply a matter of how you see AI. The colloquial understanding of AI is something that is able to generally "think" like a human. To them, and perhaps to you too, the goal of AI is to emulate a human. I think to most AI researchers, AI is seen more as a way to "emulate" intelligence to solve problems - usually problems formulated as "generally" as possible. To the AI researcher, if an incredibly complex modeling approach to a problem performs just as well as a very general one, one model is not strictly better than the other (actually, the more general one is almost always is considered to be), even if one may "theoretically" model how the human mind processes the problem more accurately. Likewise, a bot capable of answering general "getter" questions such as "What is the weather?" may not have a sexy or complicated implementation, and yet could be considered good AI for its problem domain, and may in fact be much more useful than a more sohpisticated bot. There's actually a lot of work being done on chat bots, and I think perhaps you are limiting your understanding of what is being done to tutorials or toy-projects.