What is deep learning, and why should you care about it?

Whether it's Google's headline-grabbing DeepMind AlphaGo victory, or Apple's weaving of "using deep neural network technology" into iOS 10, deep learning and artificial intelligence are all the rage these days, promising to take applications to new heights in how they interact with us mere mortals. To go deeper (yes, I went there) on the subject, I reached out to the team at the deep learning-focused company Skymind, creators of Deep Learning For Java (DL4J), and authors of the recently released O'Reilly book Deep Learning: A Practitioner's Approach, Josh Patterson and Adam Gibson. Josh and Adam offer us a gentle introduction to the subject in this interview, as well as insight into how they are building an open source-based business around deep learning. Adam Gibson (AG): Deep learning is just another term for neural networks, a set of algorithms that have been around for decades. For a long time people were skeptical about them, but as chips got more powerful and as we gathered more data to train them on, deep neural nets started breaking records.