WHY THE DEEP LEARNING BOOM CAUGHT ALMOST EVERYONE BY SURPRISE

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

The AI boom of the last 12 years was made possible by three visionaries who pursued unorthodox ideas in the face of widespread criticism. Geoffrey Hinton spent decades promoting neural networks despite near-universal skepticism. Jensen Huang recognized early that GPUs could be useful for more than just graphics. Fei-Fei Li created an image data set that turned out to be essential for demonstrating the potential of neural networks trained on GPUs. This article tells the story of how these figures contributed to the AI boom.