We are far away from understanding intelligence in all directions. Top down, bottom up, neurologically, psychologically, logically, mathematically and last but not least philosophically.

There's optimism at the moment, because we are doing more stuff with more annotated data (the annotations providing the semantic grounding, as in "Not hot dog" vs. "Not in category 339492-883764-399274"). The key difference this time being access to (and processing power for-) sufficiently large "training sets" (read "samples") for deep-learning algorithms (read "statistical models"). From an AGI point of view, this is nothing but an expensive parlor trick, because the "intelligent" part is the annotation, not the categorization after the fact.