I miss when machine learning was getting big. Communities were sprouting everywhere and making so many interesting demonstrations using it, and I mean genuinely interesting, not tech bro delusions. These were AI that could actually learn and improve themselves (albeit over thousands to millions of randomized iterations; they were still dumb as rocks compared to even the simplest animals), and stuff like genetic algorithms could brute-force discoveries that humans hadn't found even after decades of trying (for example, I believe a major hurdle in modeling protein folding was finally solved using these types of AI).

It was especially cool in the video game space. Hobbyists were doing crazy shit like getting an AI to reliably play a racing game while balancing vertically on the tip of the car the entire time, or setting up complicated mazes only for the AI to figure out how to cheat by launching onto the walls through physics engine exploits. AIs were making novel discoveries rather than just mimicking and piggybacking off of humanity like LLMs do.

One of the coolest examples I saw a few years ago was for an automated optical inspection. You would take a picture and identify all the critical features and then manually check like 50 parts, varied between good and bad and marking why the bad ones were bad. Afterwards just throw a part under the camera and it could accurately tell good from bad with about 99% accuracy(biased towards false failures). Granted it was about 35k just for the camera and software but still really impressive.

It could locate the part and rotate the image with no fixturing and each inspection was between 10-90 milliseconds depending on what features were being inspected.

As god intended.

/s