I don't think it is just a matter of computational power: I have been quite surprised by how effective word embedding, for example, has been in abetting languag

I don't think it is just a matter of computational power: I have been quite surprised by how effective word embedding, for example, has been in abetting language translation (note that I am not claiming that it has solved the problem; I am too familiar with the problems of idiomatic Vietnamese-English translation.) Of course, if you had different intuitions (or more knowledge) than me, you might not be so impressed. Having said that, I agree that the projections seem highly optimistic, but maybe I will be surprised again.