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The deep learning boom caught almost everyone by surprise

"You’ve taken this idea way too far," a mentor told Prof. Fei-Fei Li.

That groundbreaking AI model, dubbed AlexNet after lead author Alex Krizhevsky, kicked off the deep learning boom that has continued until the present day. In a landmark 1986 paper, Hinton teamed up with two of his former colleagues at UCSD, David Rumelhart and Ronald Williams, to describe a technique called backpropagation for efficiently training deep neural networks. “This meant that we wouldn’t be presenting our work in a lecture hall to an audience at a predetermined time, but would instead be given space on the conference floor to prop up a large-format print summarizing the project in hopes that passersby might stop and ask questions… After so many years of effort, this just felt anticlimactic.”

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