Pretty much the only "AI" in that demo is edge detection (against a uniform background) and pattern recognition (by direct comparison with a handful of simple g

Pretty much the only "AI" in that demo is edge detection (against a uniform background) and pattern recognition (by direct comparison with a handful of simple geometric shapes). Other than that, the robot seems to be following a hand-coded set of instructions to assemble the provided parts. The current state of research, as described in the article, is a neural network which recognizes which hardware it's currently controlling and uses it to autonomously perform tasks assigned using natural language. So it seems to me that there has been some progress.