but not really related to general-purpose AI.
Amongst people who actually build robots, it's generally understood that you don't get general-purpose AI by creating a 'general intelligence' and letting it run; it seems much more likely that we'll need a lot of small, task-specific systems that can work together.
You are channeling too much certainty through the reference to authority. We are too far away from seeing the solution to describe its form in detail, much less to defer to the popular perception.
I recently saw this Reuters article on Yahoo News. In typical science reporting fashion, the headline seems to be pure hyperbole - does anyone here know enough to clarify what the groups referenced have actually achieved?
This links represent what I could find:
Homepage of the "Robot Scientist" project:http://www.aber.ac.uk/compsci/Research/bio/robotsci/
Homepage of Hod Lipson: http://www.mae.cornell.edu/lipson/
Hod Lipson's 2007 paper "Automated reverse engineering of nonlinear dynamical systems" (pdf)