TL;DR; tooling is improving rapidly, and while this AI boom will someday end, we'll be left with tools to incorporate the things that do work in our everyday work.<p>Working for a "digital innovation lab" where a big part of my job is sorting out things that developers can actually use to make cool products from Gartner report buzzword hell, I have a few thoughts about this.<p>Historically, AI has seen boom and bust cycles. AI, unlike other buzzword technologies, has a large cultural mythos about it - Asimov didn't write "I, EC2 Instance", after all. Thus, non-technical people have very strong and often unrealistic set of expectations around AI, so every time there are technological advances, people expect that general AI is right around the corner, and are disappointed when it doesn't materialize. Right now, we're experiencing a boom cycle as a result of the emergence of deep learning techniques. After every boom, funding dries up and investors loose interest, but the techniques that really work stick around and become part of a developers everyday toolkit.<p>Like all "black sorcery" technologies, AI has a ways to go in terms of building convenient tooling. Tensorflow is a huge improvement over writing low level CUDA code, but it's still too low level for folks without a strong background in mathematics and machine learning. That said, it's been improving in usability, documentation, and tooling, and just a couple of weeks I was part of a hackathon where we turned their pet recognition demo[1] into software to detect objects of interest to my company in satellite images.<p>At an even higher level are a number of startups (such as Clarifai[2]) that offer AI-as-a-service. In Clarifai's case, you can train your own image recognition models and apply them with a few lines in your favorite programming language (yeah, yeah, I'm shilling them a bit, but I really like their product ;-).<p>So at the end of the day, I think we'll all be building various kinds of AI into our products in the not-so-distant future, but you won't really need to go deep into tensorflow and similarly low level tools to do so.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/tensorflow/models/blob/master/object_detection/g3doc/running_pets.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tensorflow/models/blob/master/object_dete...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://clarifai.com/developer/quick-start" rel="nofollow">https://clarifai.com/developer/quick-start</a>