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1 year agoThat’s true, even if the specific example doesn’t hold, the core concept does. If I needed to implement a bird detector today, I’d make an API call to AWS Rekognition or an equivalent service. It would take me a day or two to learn the API and then maybe 4 hours to actually implement. But if you asked me to implement a bird species detector, I’m pretty sure there is no off the shelf API capable of that, and I would indeed need months or years.
Very often, headlines about new, revolutionary medical breakthroughs actually do result in breakthrough treatments for specific niche disease scenarios. For instance, cancer deaths are down roughly 1/3 over the past 30 years.