The current problem is that we don’t have a reliable, scalable way to merge in features of knowledge engines that have ontological relationships of entities with generative engines that are good for making more natural looking or sounding qualitative output. There’s certainly research going on to join them together but it’s just not getting the kind of press releases as the generative and pattern recognition stuff that’s much easier comparatively. The whole “General AI Complete” class of problems seems to be ones that are trying to combine multiple areas of more specific AI systems but that’s exactly where more practical problems for the average person arise.
Agreed, but that's because they're hard to integrate together: one is concerned with enumerating over all facts that humans know about (a la Cyc) and the other is concerned with learning those directly from data. Developing feedback systems that combine these two would be quite exciting.
