What are use-cases for this? I mean, obviously detecting the filetype is useful, but we kinda already have plenty of tools to do that, and I cannot imagine, why we need some "smart" way of doing this. If you are not a human, and you are not sure what is it (like, an unknown file being uploaded to a server) you would be better off just rejecting it completely, right? After all, there's absolutely no way an "AI powered" tool can be more reliable than some dumb, err-on-safer-side heuristic, and you wouldn't want to trust that thing to protect you from malicious payloads.
Virus detection is mentioned in the article. Code editors need to find the programming language for syntax highlighting of code before you give it a name. Your desktop OS needs to know which program to open files with. Or, recovering files from a corrupted drive. Etc
It's easy to distinguish, say, a PNG from a JPG file (or anything else that has well-defined magic bytes). But some files look virtually identical (eg. .jar files are really just .zip files). Also see polyglot files [1].
If you allow an `unknown` label or human intervention, then yes, magic bytes might be enough, but sometimes you'd rather have a 99% chance to be right about 95% of files vs. a 100% chance to be right about 50% of files.
