As far as I know when we say AI today we just mean computers that perform various mathematical calculations in a way that makes it appear superficially like human reasoning. That is no where near the kind of cognition that humans or animals do and there is no reason to think we have even touched or started on machines that can do the type of cognition that humans engage in.
One of the biggest reasons Watson is able to beat the champions so thoroughly is that it has a huge advantage in buzzer reaction timing. If that element were taken out, it would be much closer.
Indeed. If Kurzweil and Schmidhuber want to predict the future by extrapolating a curve, they should try the one for the amount of AGI technology we have, which so far is a flat line at zero.
Computation is not cognition.