Are you kidding me? It's not a cute statistical trick, it's a well-thought out mechanism to re-create in 1's and 0's how the human brain works and thinks, we're merely infants in what this will become, as we mind map the brain more - I'm sure the technology will pivot quite a bit, neural networks may be obsolete and something more powerful come along viz a viz quantum computing, but to say talking robots that can totally be confused for a real person, and self-driving cars that make life/death decisions on their own is not impressive and not AI or 'machine learning' is outride ridiculous.

Intelligence is something with short and long term memory, that can learn new things in an organic fashion, right now we can 'train' ai's to do some amazing things -- but this is only the beginning.