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.

AI in the Real World

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