Machine translation, search, recommendation, face/object detection, image processing are just a subset of very real technologies broadly deployed today that benefit from machine learning (a subset of AI).

AI does suffer from the problem where the term seems to be defined as “what we can't do now”. That said, I think those are also good examples of why it's important to be realistic – good translation has been significant, especially for travelers, but search, recommendations, face detection, etc. have been modest incremental improvements. That's great to have but a lot of people aren't content with that billing and create problems by overselling it as game-changing.

Exactly. - "In my experience and opinion, as soon as something is well defined it becomes Artificial Narrow Intelligence - Vision systems, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Neural Networks - it loses the name "AI" and gets its own specific name."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24767341

Face detection is really valuable to me. I have cameras on the front of my house and I get an alert on my phone when someone unrecognized comes up to the house. It sometimes false triggers on me and my wife but it let us know 1) when a package is delivered 2) when our kids wander out to the front yard 3) hasn't happened yet, but if a sketchy person came onto our property.

Yes, and it's gotten better than the older CV approaches. My point is that it's nice but it didn't significantly transform your life the same way, say, a smartphone did.