Using any functional, practical definition of "artificial intelligence" that I've ever heard, we have certainly made a lot of progress since the late AI winter.
It sounds like you're using the unfortunate definition that essentially defines any task as "not requiring intelligence" the instant a machine is able to perform it well. This has been done with voice recognition, facial recognition, music composition, etc., and is actually one of the main reasons we even had the AI winter.
I don't think that's a very good argument. Okay, so let's say we used to think it took intelligence to recognize voice/face. Then we figured out a way to do it! Oh man, intelligence, right? Well, no. We realized that you can stick the voice through a spectrograph and measure the peaks, that's certainly not intelligence. And that you can detect the edges of bits of faces pretty easily and then compare various ratios for similarity. That's clever on the part of the algorithm designers but nothing intellect-related.
I've never heard anyone say that music requires intelligence. Creativity maybe. But I can make a very simple program that has a bunch of hard-coded music patterns that it picks from and nests randomly. It can 'creatively' output trillions of different songs and clearly has nothing even approaching intelligence.
Intelligence is not about what an algorithm can mechanically do. It's about comprehensive world-modeling that can predict and communicate with other agents. If something can be coded in a month by a grad student to run on an 8086 then I feel comfortable saying it's not AI.
When it comes to face/voice recognition, what makes you think people are doing anything more clever? Our brains seem to have edge and shape detection modules too, do they not? Is it not knowing the algorithm that makes what we do seem "intelligent?
There seems to be a miscommunication here. I don't think people are doing anything particularly clever with regards to facial recognition. I think intelligence is based on complex, abstract, general reasoning. Physical object recognition is a useful input filter but not evidence of intellect.
It's not knowing the algorithm at all. I'm just pretty sure that the algorithm for intelligence is more complex/further from our knowledge than a contemporary grad student could do. I'd love to be proven wrong by a PhD thesis with attached AI.
It sounds like you're using the unfortunate definition that essentially defines any task as "not requiring intelligence" the instant a machine is able to perform it well. This has been done with voice recognition, facial recognition, music composition, etc., and is actually one of the main reasons we even had the AI winter.