It still astounds me that not only did none of those customers sue us for blatant misrepresentation, but most of them were delighted with what they'd bought.
I had a similar cognitive dissonance when doing "R&D Grant applications" a long time back. I kept on thinking "Research" was the sort of rigorous academic work you do to earn a PhD. In the government/business world, it seems pretty much spending time or money to learn how to do anything not 100% required for your business previously counts. Including things like "selling our widgets, only via the internet" being valid and acceptable thing to get government rebates for "R&D". I still feel dirty everytime I draft one of those grant applications... :shrug:
It doesn't have to change the world, as long as it moves the needle.
My experience is that people tend to consider things AI whenever it feels like "magic" to them, at least in non-technical circles.
I slapped together a POC javascript tinyYolo feature detector demo last weekend (using someone else's code and pre-trained model from their github project), and joked when I showed it around that "And we can tell investors we're running AI, deep learning, and convolutional neural networks in our realtime production workflow!"...
(But as we all know, all the _proper_ magic is done by the regexes buried in that Perl module dependency hidden in a deeply nested source code directory that no-one without a grey beard is ever game to peer into...)
I was recently joking that I was training a neural network with a water spray bottle (teaching the cat not to jump on the kitchen counter). And just while I type this, my little neural network came to walk over the keyboard...
Free idea for a children's TV show right there.
> From the other end
Yeah, using wongarsu’s example of chess: brute forcing chess was once a highlight if AI achievement and now its just a crude search algorithm.