[tim333]

>folks predicting we're just around the corner have been recognized once again as shysters, hucksters, and charlatans

is a bit vague as to how long round the corner is and which folk you are thinking of but there have been very non charlatan predictions that you'd be getting something like HAL around now based on the Moore's law like improvements in hardware performance which have kept going for a century and are currently accelerating due to the vast amounts of cash being thrown in.

Probably the best of them in terms of reasoned thinking and being ahead of the curve is Hans Moravec, a robotics guy at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon who argued computers would be reaching this point around now in his 1988 book - graph here https://imgur.com/a/moravec-graph-V3S2XoK and there's more detail in his 1998 paper https://jetpress.org/volume1/moravec.pdf

The reasoning is very down to earth based on his research attempts at robot vision and comparing the hardware needed to that of the retina - not much hucksterism.

In the graph in the paper on page 5 or so he has computer power roughly going from the equivalent of a lizard to a monkey to a human over about two decades so going by that and assuming they are around human level now they should be about monkey to human level better than us in a decade or so. Not sure if that counts as superintelligence around the corner? This is all independent of which particular algorithms are used.