Famous Xkcd comic comes full circle with AI bird-identifying binoculars

arstechnica.com

40 points·isaacfrond··10 comments

I assume they had a research team and five years?

Sounds like it took 10 years, and probably more people than one research team for that. SW developers are really bad at asking for the right amount of resources.

Managers are really bad at hearing the right amount of resources.

We just need a massive open source movement, large tech companies to via weird competitive currents kinda act like open research departments, massive increase in compute power and a lot of hype dollars and a tonne of smart people distributed across the world in different companies and universities, 5 years and a research team please, errrr… boss.

To be fair there's been a research app available for over 5 years (launched in 2014, I first used it in 2018/19)

https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/the-story/

Also, from the main article,

> According to Swarovski, the development of the AX Visio took approximately five years,

> According to Swarovski, the development of the AX Visio took approximately five years, involving around 390 "hardware parts."

Merlin has been out for like a decade

Just buy a Vizycam: https://vizycam.com. It's less than $200.

Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38964575

Is there a good example to use for something that's "virtually impossible" nowadays?

comic: https://xkcd.com/1425/

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