An understanding of AI’s limitations is starting to sink in

Your comment is a little hand-wavy and strongly worded ("revolution", "immeasurable", "limitless", "all domains").

Many things have exponential growth - bacterial reproduction, compound interest, certain chemical reactions. It's important to understand that this does not automatically result in miraculous universal transformation, but must be considered in the context of the world we live in. A little humility is always in order.

I work on a production ML platform, so I spend way too much time rabbit-holing on interesting looking projects.

If you're looking for interesting startups/projects-not-from-big-tech:

- Glisten.ai (https://www.glisten.ai/). Recent YC startup, uses a combination of different models to parse product information (actually a huge manual problem in retail/ecommerce) and expose it as an api.

- Wildlife Protection Solutions - Recently deployed a model that can automatically detect poachers in nature preserves. Detects twice as many poachers as previous monitoring solutions.

- Ezra.ai - Uses models to search MRIs for cancers, operational in a few different US cities.

- AI Dungeon - A text adventure game built on GPT-2 (now GPT-3). Super fun, if a little silly.

Now, those are just a handful of smaller companies whose core products are ML. There are a ton of financial institutions using ML for fraud detection, real estate platforms like Reonomy that use a variety of models for evaluating investments, and security companies using ML.

But of course, the obvious answer to this question is "Every popular app you use incorporates ML."

Gmail: Smart Compose, spam filtering, etc.

Uber/Maps: ETA Prediction

Netflix/Spotify/all content platforms: Recommendation engines

Facebook/Instagram/Snap/image apps: A variety of models for recognizing faces, object tracking, etc.

People have this weird "Skynet or it's snake oil" paradigm they use to evaluate ML, ignoring the fact that production machine learning is more or less ubiquitous at this point.

I know you might mean well, but I can't help but get the same feeling reading your post as I do every time I read a wide-eyed self-proclaimed "futurist" snake oil enthusiast going on about something along the lines of how we're all going to be sending our children to pre-school in autonomous flying vehicles within the next few years, or listening to blockchain snake oil salesmen rant about how the whole world is going to revolve around their shitcoin in the near future.

I feel like I've been reading or hearing a repeat of the same ML/"AI" "my team has something huge just around the corner" pitch every week for at least a decade now, and always with the "but I can't be more specific because reasons" and "just look at how much this other thing improved over X years!" aspects tacked on. The only thing that changes each time is the person making the claim.

Less time making grandiose claims on internet forums might give you more time to produce something that could at least be passed as partially living up to those claims, or at least give you the right to say "we tried" in your "amazing journey" post somewhere down the line.

I hope to be proven wrong, but in my experiences the people actually achieving impressive things aren't out there loudly bragging about it before they have anything to show.

Do you have NoScript or some other blocker on? As far as I can tell, Economist.com is using smallcaps for all acronyms but for some reason, the smallcaps are implemented solely through JavaScript, so if you read without that, you just see lower-case. The lowercase is because if you have uppercase, smallcaps does nothing - it can't become 'small capitals' because it's already large capitals, as it were. Letters need to be lowercase to be smallcaps. So, that's why you see 'ai' instead of 'AI'. So the 'ai' can properly transform into 'ᴀɪ'.

This is bad because JS is not necessary, and it is also not necessary to write in lower-case in the first place! I know this because I do a similar thing on gwern.net: in addition to manually-specified smallcaps formatting, a rewrite pass while compiling automatically annotates any >=3-letter acronym. However, I do it purely via CSS, and I also don't need to lowercase anything. How? Because a good font like Source Serif Pro will include a special feature which will smallcaps just capital letters: 'c2sc' in `font-feature-settings` CSS. So to do smallcaps correctly, of regular text & uppercase, you have 2 CSS classes: "smallcaps" and "smallcaps-auto". "smallcaps" gets the normal 'smcp' font feature and operates the usual way, lowercase gets smallcaps, uppercase is left alone. "smallcaps-auto" is used by the acronym rewrite pass, and it does ''smcp', 'c2sc'' instead, so "AI" does indeed get smallcaps.

This way, I need 0 JS, I don't need to write everything in lowercase, copy-paste works perfectly, I don't need to manually annotate acronyms unless I want to, and everything Just Works for every reader.

(I don't, however, smallcaps two-letter things like "AI". That's just silly looking.)