Forget AGI, let's build really useful AI tools

The tech giants already know this and are investing in democratizing AI to make tools and services more widely available, but the user experience (UX) of machine learning is still overlooked. Companies can make massive improvements to machine learning-based applications even without access to the same levels of data or talent as the biggest players -- compensating for a lack of data by building a great UI (more on this later). When we focus on AI as a tool and recognize how crucial usability is to widespread adoption, we can see that there are opportunities to enhance existing AI in ways that have nothing to do with progress toward human-level machine intelligence or artificial general intelligence. While flashy projects like DeepMind and Google Brain are more likely to make headlines than Google's more mundane implementations of AI, such as search, the latter is a vastly more profitable business. According to a recent MarketWatch article, Google has "made a massive multibillion-dollar bet on AI and machine learning," a bet I believe is nicely hedged on the question of whether there'll be another "AI winter," a period of reduced interest in AI.