I've said it before, but articles like this do more harm than good for the field of AI research. Overhype has killed interest in the field numerous times before, and if we're not careful it can do it again. Advice to reporters who have an AI story: please don't hyperbolize both what the AI can do and how it works. If AI companies over promise and under deliver enough times, interest in an exciting field may die down again.
How is this overhype? If anything I feel it's a pretty mundane system they're describing - some sentence parsing along with various database lookups. They seem to stear pretty clear of AGI hardness.
There's a delicate balance to strike between hype and optimism, but I agree that a lot of writing on the subject lands squarely in the realm of unfulfillable hype.
