Working with Artificial Intelligence isn’t for everyone, but it’s for far more people now than ever before. In a Bloomberg Technology piece about a small crew of programmers who created an application to read Japanese handwriting even though they themselves can’t, Pavel Alpeye points out that AI being “sold like a utility” has democratized such work, though I would add that it still helps to be really, really smart.

The opening:

Real-world artificial-intelligence applications are popping up in unexpected places—and much sooner than you might think.

While winning a game of Go might be impressive, machine intelligence is also evolving to the point where it can be used by more people to do more things. That’s how four engineers with almost zero knowledge of Japanese were able to create software, in just a few months, that can decipher handwriting in the language.

The programmers at Reactive Inc. came up with an application that recognizes scrawled-out Japanese with 98.66 percent accuracy. The 18-month-old startup in Tokyo is part of a growing global community of coders and investors who are harnessing the power of neural networks to put AI to far more practical purposes than answering trivia or winning board games. 

“Just a few years ago, you had to be a genius to do this,” said David Malkin, who has a Ph.D. in machine learning but can barely string two Japanese sentences together. “Now you can be a reasonably smart guy and make useful stuff. Going forward, it will be more about using imagination to apply this to real business situations.”•