[mbrock]

In a few years, what we now call "AI" is probably going to be a necessary part of at least most user-facing systems.

Like, we'll go from calling this thing "AI" into just thinking that systems that don't have these basic cognitive functions are really stupid and tedious.

Decades ago, you might have considered spell checking a form of "AI". Now, maybe we would consider an advanced grammar checker "AI". Maybe in five years, we will appreciate "semantics checkers" that check if what we say actually makes sense, or "pragmatics checkers" that make sure we aren't using an inappropriate tone of voice.

In a way "AI" is just a name for the frontier of making computers work for us.

But just like you don't need to be a compiler engineer to use advanced programming languages, you probably won't need to be a machine learning engineer to build user-facing systems.

So a lot of "AI" companies are focusing on building APIs for other systems to utilize. Double buzzword whammo: AI in the cloud!