ChatGPT is most popular and often in news, because it is the first of its kind(after siri/cortana) which was accessible to general public. I think, I have seen at least 100+ indie and commercial wrappers/apps offering access to better chat interface and common place to access various models from OAI/Anthropic/Mistral. At least one business I read about this weekend uses OAI API to ingest and summarize extensive mountain of documents to simplify some sort of regulatory certification process for medical device manufacturers. There was another one, which allowed a virtual assistant with basic activity ability(book appointments, write emails, transcribe phone calls, summarize letters etc.)
Things will come eventually, as more and more people get access to the APIs and access becomes cheap(current model of per-token price is still immensely expensive imho) and general people do not understand what context is, what embedding is, what exactly is a model, what is an API.
AI was/is being used massively in medical sector, defense/military, fraud detection(finance) and various other sectors for decades or more. Unfortunately, those applications are behind closed door and do not need to drum up public interest or investments directly as those are already well financed and usually referred to as ML/DL/CV etc.
For example, I was doing an internship many many years back where my employer was using "AI"(though it was not referred to as such) to combine vision, noise, vibration, pressure and hundreds of other data to detect hit-n-run, break-in crimes, structural damage, prediction of collapse of large structures etc. and these were prominently used by insurance as well as some public service offices. These were specialized things, and outside of their closed doors, no one was interested about these.
But here are some examples of things that used to fall under the AI umbrella but don't really anymore:
- Fulltext search with decent semantic hit ranking (Google)
- Fulltext search with word sense disambiguation (Google)
- Fulltext search with decent synonym hits (Google)
- Machine translation
- Text to speech
- Speech to text
- Automated biometric identification (Like for unlocking your phone)