I didn't exactly build anything in terms of creating anything new. I'm in a phase right now where I'm doing a lot of reading and background research. So I just finished reading Laird's SOAR book[1], and the second volume of Goertzel's Engineering General Intelligence[2]. Now I'm working on finishing Pinker's Words and Rules[3].

On the more hands-on front, all I really did was download the source for the various components of OpenCog[4], build them, and get all of that stuff installed. The plan for the next little while is to start playing around with building simple systems with OpenCog and SOAR[5] and gain a deeper understanding of both.

So yeah, wish I had something more exciting to talk about, but that's just where things are for me right now.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262122960/

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-General-Intelligence-Part...

[3]: https://www.amazon.com/Words-Rules-Ingredients-Language-Scie...

[4]: https://opencog.org/

[5]: https://soar.eecs.umich.edu/

I'm curious how close the research community is to general AI

Nobody knows, because we don't know how to do it yet. There could be a "big breakthrough" tomorrow that more or less finishes it out, or it could take 100 years, or - worst case - Penrose turns out to be right and it's not possible at all.

Also, are there useful books, courses or papers that go into general AI research?

Of course there are. See:

https://agi.mit.edu

https://agi.reddit.com

http://www.agi-society.org/

https://opencog.org/

https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-General-Intelligence-Part...

https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-General-Intelligence-Part...

https://www.amazon.com/Artificial-General-Intelligence-Cogni...

https://www.amazon.com/Universal-Artificial-Intelligence-Alg...

https://www.amazon.com/How-Create-Mind-Thought-Revealed/dp/0...

https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Understanding-Creation-I...

https://www.amazon.com/Society-Mind-Marvin-Minsky/dp/0671657...

https://www.amazon.com/Unified-Theories-Cognition-William-Le...

https://www.amazon.com/Master-Algorithm-Ultimate-Learning-Ma...

https://www.amazon.com/Singularity-Near-Humans-Transcend-Bio...

https://www.amazon.com/Emotion-Machine-Commonsense-Artificia...

https://www.amazon.com/Physical-Universe-Oxford-Cognitive-Ar...

See also, the work on various "Cognitive Architectures", including SOAR, ACT-R, CLARION, etc,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_architecture

"Neuvoevolution"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroevolution

and "Biologically Inspired Computing"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biologically_inspired_computin...