1. One Thing that Helps
When you've lost a pet you sometimes need to do more than put posters up in your street.
Platforms like Petco Love Lost use image recognition to compare a missing pet photo against thousands of images from shelters, rescues, and community posts. Instead of relying on someone to manually scan endless photos, the system looks for visual markers like facial structure and ear shape to identify likely matches.
That matters because lost pets often look different after some time away. Dirt, stress, lighting, and camera angle can make them hard for humans to recognise. AI can keep checking at scale, over time, across far more images than a person could reasonably review.
It is not a replacement for microchips or tags. But it is a practical second layer that improves the odds of getting a pet home.
2. One to be Wary of
A chatbot agreeing with you does not necessarily mean what you said is true.
That was the real lesson from Bernie Sanders’ exchange with Claude. Bernie wanted to show AI exposing uncomfortable truths about privacy. What it really showed was how easily a chatbot can be steered by the way questions are framed.
Ask a leading question and you will often get a leading answer. Push harder and many models will concede even further. That is part of what makes them useful, but also risky. They can sound authoritative while simply reflecting the assumptions of the user.
AI can accelerate thinking and execution, but it should not replace critical judgement. As these systems become more capable, the need for human scrutiny increases, not decreases.
3. One to Amaze
Pokémon Go may have built something more valuable than a hit game.
By sending millions of people out into the world pointing phones at buildings and landmarks, Niantic collected a huge visual dataset tied to real locations. Its spinout, Niantic Spatial, is now using that data to help last-mile delivery robots navigate places where GPS struggles, like dense city streets, underpasses, and high-rise corridors.
This is crucial because for delivery robots, getting close is not enough. They need to find the right restaurant pickup point, the right path along the footpath, and the right front door.
So yes, years of chasing Pikachu may end up helping your pizza arrive at exactly the right place.