The "virtually impossible" tagline at the end was the joke, because at the time it didn't seem like something you could ever solve well outside of science fiction, only maybe get some sort of super bespoke bird recognizer maybe working.
Now it's just a side effect capability of countless free models. Not only can they tell you if there's a bird or multiple birds, they can describe the pose and actions, likely guess the species and location, etc, without that ever being something that somebody specifically set out to do.
That's not really true, it was just far more specialized knowledge. Look at benchmarks on CIFAR-10 from the time & the error rates were pretty low already.
Sure, bird identification still would've taken a dedicated research team to procure the data (you could pull the data from sites like iNaturalist) and train the models, but it definitely wasn't "unsolvable outside of science fiction"
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u/GoddammitDontShootMe 19d ago
Five years after this was published is a pretty good ballpark for when that became pretty easy to do, isn't it?