I think the article speaks to this very point.
The people "trying to make an AI understand" are not making it "understand" in the sense that you and I use most commonly use the term.
You're exactly right. If you look closely, present day A.I is modeled after the cortex. It's akin to cutting out the neo-cortex, wiring in i/o hooks, and reprogramming it to one's needs (weak A.I).
The cortical regions are good at creating hierarchical feature maps and we had a bunch of search algorithms laying around in the parts bin. Presto : Present day A.I.
This approach meshes well with 'big-data' companies in possession of large compute stacks and data-sets. So, its the direction things went.
A perfect opportunity for disruption..
The current wave is on borrowed time.
