A couple fun ones I remember taking:
- Recently: Given some basic intermediate output from LLM system, build out evaluation/quality tools, especially for dealing with hallucination - ~8 years ago: Given a database table of restaurants, identify near-duplicates to merge
On the hiring manager side of things, my candidates generally enjoyed doing a take-home to build a ML model for the Li & Roth question classification dataset. That involved a bit more creativity and it was very role-related.
After being on both sides of the interview process, my current feeling is that take-homes are a decent fit for junior roles but take-homes are not a good use of time (on either side) for senior roles.