The fact that a ton of AI work was beaten by a flash of inspiration just goes to show how far behind AI is over the human brain. But excitingly, it also suggests a crazy future where machine can actually do that.
I think it goes to show how easy it is to get reddit karma. I wrote a bot that uses 2 regular expressions to generate reddit comments. In the 16 days since I created it, it's amassed more than 7k karma (despite substantial downtime due to bugs)
I don't think that a current limitation is an indicator of future success. I think a more likely future is one governed by diminishing returns, and prohibitively large computation.