All sorts of really cool stuff in the next few years. Deepmind had amazing results on reinforcement learning beating Atari games with just raw video data (video.) Google bought them a month later for half a billion dollars.

Reinforcement learning is of interest because it's not just machine learning, predicting outputs given inputs. It is AI, it's very general.

Some other interesting work is neural turing machines. The NNs can learn to take advantage of an infinite tape. As opposed to learning individual memory and i/o cells, they can operate on arrays. So you can theoretically learn arbitrary programs with gradient descent.

Deep neural networks have shown a huge amount of progress in a lot of AI domains, from vision to natural language, speech. Recently a paper showed they could predict the move an expert Go player would make 44% of the time.

Machine vision has consistently been decreasing the error rate by half every year for the past few years, and just today surpassed human performance.

Stuart Russel said that there has been more investment in AI in the last five years, than since the field was founded. And it's increasing exponentially.

I think it's well within the realm of possibility we could get strong AI within 10-20 years.