WHY THE DEEP LEARNING BOOM CAUGHT ALMOST EVERYONE BY SURPRISE

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

The surprising rise of deep learning was thanks to three visionaries: Geoffrey Hinton, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Fei-Fei Li. While Hinton's work on backpropagation laid the groundwork for efficient deep neural network training, it was Huang's CUDA platform that enabled the necessary parallel processing power. Li's ImageNet dataset provided the large amount of data required to train these models.