
Ask HN: Name one biggest improvement in your life made possible thanks to AI? - dgudkov
Following the topic about new &quot;AI winter&quot;. What has AI managed to deliver to you personally so far?
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sgillen
Professionally: Better image recognition by a mile. I'm a controls engineer,
but having better information about the environment from my camera is huge for
robotics.

I see this personally too although the wins aren't as big, for example I've
seen Facebook ask me to correctly identify friends as a way to verify
identity, thought that was pretty cool.

Probably though the biggest personal impact has been better google searches,
it's pretty rare that I have to search more than once to find what I'm looking
for these days (for non technical stuff anyway). It seems like I used to need
to use less google fu than I used to.

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Rjevski
The fear of every single click & action being used to train a neural network
and thus recording that action _forever_ to serve me "better" ads.

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vinayms
Amazon showing me the related books based on what I browsed or bought.

I no longer need to go on a wild goose chase googling to find similar books.
This way I have found some real gems that I might not have had I simply
googled for similar books. So, when I do have to google for a book on a new
topic that piqued my interest, I know that once I find an Amazon page directly
or find a forum post recommending one and then open that page on Amazon, the
rest of the search would be a relatively smooth ride.

~~~
riku_iki
Not just books, other all products as well, video/music recommendations on
youtube, netflix, prime video, spotify.. Not sure if it is really 'AI'
though..

~~~
vinayms
The only product I use from what you listed is YouTube. While I have found
some interesting videos there, I can't say it made sense based on what I had
watched or searched before. In contrast, with books on Amazon I am thoroughly
satisfied. Not sure if this is because books are easier to encode for the
recommendation mechanism than videos.

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fvdessen
I am a french speaking Belgian, google translate / DeepL lets me follow
Flemish politics

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DrNuke
Independent research at academic level for direct commercial exploitation
without needing a lab, the publish-or-perish rat race or daily interaction
with people anymore, all from my bedroom with a gaming laptop and 3-4-5
concurrent windows open for other tasks, 4-8-12-16 hours a day as I like. I am
not 25 anymore but still not too late and for that very lucky, grateful to the
exceptional people that are making this happen for the general public and
happy to have gotten so far in terms of opportunities and intellectual
freedom, relatively unscathed. It can stop tomorrow for whatever reason but I
can say that my dream as a kid opting for a STEM education 30 years ago has
been fulfilled.

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farseer
Gmail has much better spam filters if you have noticed. That is less time
spent on opening e-mails.

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bsvalley
In 1999 amazon was already recommending people about books on their website.
AI made discovery a lot better in the late 90’s. That was a big deal. Car
manufacturers could tell you a similar story way back then. Today, AI is just
a marketing word.

~~~
BjoernKW
I'm not sure if Amazon's recommendation algorithm would qualify as AI.

Basically, it's still just shopping basket analysis as in the somewhat famous
"Men who buy beer on Fridays are also likely to buy diapers." story
([http://web.onetel.net.uk/~hibou/Beer%20and%20Nappies.html](http://web.onetel.net.uk/~hibou/Beer%20and%20Nappies.html)
).

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amarraja
Being able to say "ok google, take me to a gas* station" without having to
touch my phone whilst driving.

* I'm English, and we tend to say "petrol station", sadly even Google's AI is not there yet

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inertiatic
Youtube has been suggesting me pretty much the exact shallow stuff I need to
consume to keep myself entertained while doing chores around the house. I
doubt that's simply collab filtering, so it might count as AI.

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jackewiehose
if you cut out "biggest" the answer would be alexa/google for some people.

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anotheryou
still quite humble I think:

\- speech synthesis \- music recommendations

And for this I already have to adapt the "ML/statistics = AI" coining of the
term.

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fuzzfactor
For me it's been a lifetime of better and more appropriate NI.

