According to [1] there was a system in 1968 that “consistently outperformed humans when presented with the same recognition tasks”.
As someone who was into programming and electronics in the eighties, I also feel a need to object whenever people say things like “we thought it was AI until we could make a computer do it, and now it’s just math” (paraphrasing).
We (those of us interested in the subject back then) had a pretty good idea about what would be possible in the future (because of faster machines and more storage) and what would not be possible in the future (unless a breakthrough was made in understanding intelligence).
Now, I do think we underestimated how fast things have developed, and especially the resources people have access today via the internet, but none of what I have seen today would have been classified as AI by myself back in the eighties.
I also mucked around with computers in the 80s and agree with most of that. I guess a lot of whether stuff is AI comes down to how you define it. The Oxford English Dict has:
>[mass noun] The theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages.
So obviously by that speech and Zucks type of face recognition are AI. I note the '68 system was hybrid and required humans to measure the faces and enter data for where the features are so it was more analysing numbers.
But as a data point, you could do it 10 years ago. On a cheap desktop PC. And without Internet connection or cloud computing.
Source: around 2006 I made a Star Trek-like music control system with Microsoft Speech API and an electret microphone hand-soldered to a long cable and an audio jack. With ~30 minutes of training on my voice it worked as reliably in noisy environment as Google works for me now.
