The point is to help knowledgeable people find observations they are interested in, by “surfacing unknown observations” as mentioned above. I started with aphids because I had in mind @glmory comment above. Then I did the same for butterflies, just because this is more popular.
I grabbed about 300.000 observations (of all kinds) without identification. I don’t intend to ID them myself. (Yet I did it myself for the taxa I am the most interested in). And I don’t intend to ID them automatically either, for avoiding mistakes and because it is not iNat policy (else iNat would already ID all observations automatically).
By now, I just illustrate what it is possible to do for unidentified observations, using computer vision as a filter when searching for observations. Previous discussion here.
The new point is that I make a “surfacing unknown observations” feature available to you without providing a separate software tool as I did before, simply by using an existing feature of iNat, namely the traditional projects. (Very few people have used the separate tool I made available earlier).
Future perspective : I could also automate the selection of taxa (like aphids or butterflies) for which other similar projects could be created, and then populate all these projects automatically (potentially with hundreds of thousands of observations, distributed over different projects). The choice of these taxa should take into account how many observations would fall in the different projects, so that there is no project with too few, or too many, observations. But for the moment it is urgent to do nothing…