Yes, those applications are awesome. I just think they don't hold a candle to (sorry for the pun) fire, or electricity. But maybe that's not a useful comparison

Yes, those applications are awesome. I just think they don't hold a candle to (sorry for the pun) fire, or electricity. But maybe that's not a useful comparison, since very few people likely think (today's) AI to be _that_ revolutionary. The comparison to fire and electricity aside --- you're absolutely right, we can do very interesting things with machine learning & automatic differentiation these days!