The latest Computer Vision model can identify almost 90,000 taxa, which is impressive, but bearing in mind that:
- it’s already learned the easiest and most accessible IDs and the next 90,000 will be harder
- it still generates a non-neglible number of errors and is incapable of understanding when it is wrong
- more than 2 million living species have been described of which the Computer Vision can recognise fewer than 5%
- that there are many more, perhaps millions more, species remaining to be described
we are a very long way from not needing taxonomists any more. Whether the powers-that-be recognise this and allocate adequate funding for taxonomists is another question, but AI will definitely be nowhere near replacing human expertise for a long time to come.