Can we perhaps edit "singularity is near" out of the title? This sounds impressive, but having a bunch of racks able to classify the outline of a face is vastly disconnected from machine and humanity merging.
It does this for 20,000 different objects categories - this is getting close to matching human visual ability (and there are huge societal implications if computer reach that standard). This is the most powerful AI experiment yet conducted (publicly known).
That's an ill-defined statement. AI is a vast and diverse field: what makes one demonstration more "powerful" than another? There are definitely other projects that could be viewed as being in the same class of "powerful" as this cluster.
This is certainly an interesting paper, but it has to be viewed in the context of a large and active field.