This happened right before the first AI Winter in the late 80s: AI (in the form of expert systems) solved a number of hard problems and was hyped as being able to solve every problem. Reality set in when we figured out:
1. It didn't scale and
2. Getting 80% of the problem solved was easy, but getting that last 20% was very, very hard. Maybe several orders of magnitude harder than the first 80%.
Nowadays we don't seem to have problem 1 quite so much, but problem 2 is still there in a big way. Witness self-driving cars, where driving on an interstate highway in broad daylight is easy, but driving through a snow-covered construction zone at night is impossible. Or just dealing with a bicyclist on the road without killing them.
1. It didn't scale and
2. Getting 80% of the problem solved was easy, but getting that last 20% was very, very hard. Maybe several orders of magnitude harder than the first 80%.
Nowadays we don't seem to have problem 1 quite so much, but problem 2 is still there in a big way. Witness self-driving cars, where driving on an interstate highway in broad daylight is easy, but driving through a snow-covered construction zone at night is impossible. Or just dealing with a bicyclist on the road without killing them.
We're not going to have AGI any time soon.