Not only is this not obsolete, it’s close to biographical as it closely references the first and second Artificial Intelligence Winters. The first being in the 60s. We’ve been working on these for a long time, so 5 years is short. It took until GPGPU to kick into full gear and some clever insights to get Deep Learning up and running (somewhat attributed to work published in 2011) to start reliably on this problem, and even that is an oversimplification of the timeline and the scope.

Others have mentioned oddities like the difficulty of subject matter (picture contains a bird vs picture of a bird) but there are a lot harder problems that are trivial to humans and counterintuitively incredibly hard for computers.