Theoretical advances can be thrilling, but the excitement can drown out all the ways AI is actually being put to use. DeepIndex provides an up-to-date, well organized, cheeky guide to practical applications culled from news reports.
What it is: DeepIndex.org lists over 630 examples, organized into 19 categories and ranked according to how well they work.
- Categories include Gaming, Finance, Agriculture, Education, and Security, plus a catch-all for miscellaneous models like the one Apple used for its Animoji feature.
- DeepIndex creator Chris Yiu ranks the effectiveness of each application: Crushing It, Capable, or Getting There. The ranking reflects factors like product status, academic publications, and case studies.
Our favorites:  DeepIndex is a treasure trove of bold efforts and unlikely concepts. Yiu’s personal favorite is a model that “fixes Warner Bros.’ terrible attempts to digitally remove Henry Cavill’s mustache in [the Hollywood blockbuster] Justice League.” That’s a fun use case, no doubt, but we found others more compelling:
- Fraugster, an AI-powered fraud prevention tool, calms some of our fears of getting swept up in the next data breach.
- A chatbot called DoNotPay has overturned hundreds of thousands of parking tickets in the UK.
- The Agriculture section includes a harvest of models capable of picking strawberries, sorting cucumbers, and spraying pesticides.
- Orbital Atlas is helping the U.S. Air Force (and presumably the incipient Space Force) navigate the increasingly cluttered space surrounding planet Earth.
- A machine learning algorithm called Warblr that matches tweets, chirps, and warbles to the bird species that sang them.
- And for metalheads, Dadabots generates an endless stream of death metal music. Now that’s crushing it.