Technology thesis · Artificial Intelligence
high conviction matureComputer vision
Computer vision is a mature AI capability deployed at massive scale; the frontier has shifted from recognition to generation, and real-time biometric identification faces an EU ban.
Position maintained continuously · last reviewed Apr 22, 2026
The thesis
Core thesis
CV powers autonomous driving, medical imaging, manufacturing inspection, and security. The frontier has moved from understanding images to generating them (DALL-E, Midjourney). EU AI Act bans real-time biometric identification in public spaces, eliminating a major use case. The enterprise CV market is mature and growing steadily at 15-20% annually.
State of the art (2026)
Computer vision in 2026 is bifurcating. The recognition era has commoditised: multimodal frontier models (Gemini, GPT, Claude) now handle open-ended visual question-answering, while Meta's SAM 3, released November 2025, segments and tracks arbitrary concepts from a text prompt, collapsing what used to be bespoke detection pipelines. The action is in embodied and generative CV. Waymo runs roughly 500,000 paid robotaxi rides a week across ten US cities and is testing in Tokyo and London; Tesla operates unsupervised in Austin but with a fleet still in the dozens, holding back scale for its FSD v15 rewrite. Generation (Sora, Veo, FLUX) is reframing CV from perception to synthesis. The hard regulatory line is Europe: the EU AI Act's Article 5 ban on real-time remote biometric identification has been in force since 2 February 2025.
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Signal stack
Evidence stacked leading → lagging
Technology-native KPIs
Metrics that predict trajectory, tracked over time
Landscape map
Who builds what — and who depends on whom
Catalyst calendar
Dated events that will move the position
Technology roadmap
Milestones on the path to maturity
Watchlists
Companies, people and papers — each with a remove-by condition
Decision frameworks
The same call, framed for your desk
Thesis changelog
When our view changed, and why
Change our mind
2 disconfirming conditions
The rest is inside
You've read the verdict. The file is much deeper.
The full signal stack, technology-native KPIs tracked over time, the landscape of who depends on whom, the dated catalyst calendar, decision frameworks for every desk, live watchlists and the changelog of every time our call on Computer vision has changed — all live inside CanaryIQ.