Computer vision
Computer vision is getting better at both understanding images and generating them, and how reliable it is depends on the task. The EU's restrictions apply only to specified biometric uses.
Research snapshot · updated Nov 12, 2026
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.
Core thesis
Computer vision is used in driver assistance and self-driving vehicles, medical imaging, factory inspection and security. Models now generate images as well as interpret them, and how reliable they are depends on the task. In the EU, the AI Act prohibits real-time remote biometric identification in publicly accessible spaces for law enforcement, with narrow exceptions. The prohibition covers that specific use and leaves most other uses of computer vision outside it. We do not have a market growth figure we trust.
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Signal stack
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Signal stack
Evidence stacked leading → lagging
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Thesis changelog
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