>License plate scanning technology has been around for decades. While this is true, the big optical character recognition breakthrough was Yann LeCun's use of

>License plate scanning technology has been around for decades. While this is true, the big optical character recognition breakthrough was Yann LeCun's use of Convolutional Neural Networks in the 1990s, which I think most people put in the definitions for "ML" and "AI." But of course, as John McCarthy said: "as soon as it works, no one calls it ai anymore"