I use a lot of AI/DL-based tools in my personal life and hobbies. As a photographer, DL-based denoising means I can get better photos, especially in low light. DL-based deconvolution tools help to sharpen my astrophotos as well. The deep learning based subject tracking on my camera also helps me get more in focus shots of wildlife. As a birder, tools like Merlin BirdID’s audio recognition and image classification methods are helpful when I encounter a bird I don’t yet know how to identify.

I don’t typically use GenAI (LLMs, diffusion models) in my personal life, but Microsoft Copilot does help me write visualization scripts for my research. I can never remember the right methods for visualization libraries in Python, and Copilot/ChatGPT do a pretty good job at that.

There is no “artificial intelligence” so there are no use cases. None of the examples in this thread show any actual intelligence.

There certainly is (narrow) artificial intelligence. The examples in this thread are almost all deep learning models, which fall under ML, which in turn falls under the field of AI. They’re all artificial intelligence approaches, even if they aren’t artificial general intelligence, which more closely aligns with what a layperson thinks of when they say AI.

The problem with your characterization (showing “actual intelligence”) is that it’s super subjective. Historically, being able to play Go and to a lesser extent Chess at a professional level was considered to require intelligence. Now that algorithms can play these games, folks (even those in the field) no longer think they require intelligence and shift the goal posts. The same was said about many CV tasks like classification and segmentation until modern methods became very accurate.

I work in CV and a lot of labs I’ve worked with use consumer cards for workstations. If you don’t need the full 40+GB of VRAM you save a ton of money compared to the datacenter or workstation cards. A 4090 is approximately $1600 compared to $5000+ for an equivalently performing L40 (though with half the VRAM, obviously). The x090 series cards may be overpriced for gaming but they’re actually excellent in terms of bang per buck in comparison to the alternatives for DL tasks.

AI has certainly produced revenue streams. Don’t forget AI is not just generative AI. The computer vision in high end digital cameras is all deep learning based and gets people to buy the latest cameras, for an example.

GPU and overall firmware support is always better on x86 systems, so makes sense that you switched to that for your application. Performance is also usually better if you don’t explicitly need low power. In my use case I use the Orange Pi 5 Plus for running an astrophotography rig, so I needed something that was low power, could run Linux easily, had USB 3, reasonable single core performance, and preferably had the possibility of an upgradable A key WiFi card and a full speed NVMe E key slot for storage (preferably PCIe 3.0x4 or better). Having hardware serial ports was a plus too. x86 boxes would’ve been preferable but a lot of the cheaper stuff are older Intel mini PCs which have pretty poor battery life, and the newer power efficient stuff (N100 based) is more expensive and the cheaper ones I found tended to have onboard soldered WiFi cards unfortunately. Accordingly the Orange Pi 5 Plus ended up being my cheapest option that ticked all my boxes. If only software support was as good as x86!

Interesting to hear about the NPU. I work in CV and I’ve wondered how usable the NPU was. How did you integrate deep learning models with it? I presume there’s some conversion from runtime frameworks like ONNX to the NPU’s toolkit, but I’d love to learn more.

I’m also aware that Collabora has gotten the NPU drivers upstreamed, but I don’t know how NPUs are traditionally interfaced with on Linux.

A lot of the cheap tablet SoC vendors like Rockchip (whose SoCs end up in low cost SBCs) really only do the bare minimum when it comes to proper linux support. There’s usually next to no effort to upstreaming their patches so oftentimes you’re stuck on their vendor kernel. Luckily for the RK3588(S), Collabora has done a considerable amount of work on supporting the SoC and its peripherals upstream. I run my Orange Pi 5 Plus (RK3588) on a mainline kernel and it works for my needs.

This practice is a lot easier to defend for a low cost SoC compared to something as expensive as a Snapdragon Elite though…

I work in an ML-adjacent field (CV) and I thought I’d add that AI and ML aren’t quite the same thing. You can have non-learning based methods that fall under the field of AI - for instance, tree search methods can be pretty effective algorithms to define an agent for relatively simple games like checkers, and they don’t require any learning whatsoever.

Normally, we say Deep Learning (the subfield of ML that relates to deep neural networks, including LLMs) is a subset of Machine Learning, which in turn is a subset of AI.

Like others have mentioned, AI is just a poorly defined term unfortunately, largely because intelligence isn’t a well defined term either. In my undergrad we defined an AI system as a programmed system that has the capacity to do tasks that are considered to require intelligence. Obviously, this definition gets flaky since not everyone agrees on what tasks would be considered to require intelligence. This also has the problem where when the field solves a problem, people (including those in the field) tend to think “well, if we could solve it, surely it couldn’t have really required intelligence” and then move the goal posts. We’ve seen that already with games like Chess and Go, as well as CV tasks like image recognition and object detection at super-human accuracy.