Self-supervised learning: The plan to make deep learning data-efficient

This article is part of Demystifying AI, a series of posts that (try to) disambiguate the jargon and myths surrounding AI. Despite the huge contributions of deep learning to the field of artificial intelligence, there's something very wrong with it: It requires huge amounts of data. This is one thing that both the pioneers and critics of deep learning agree on. In fact, deep learning didn't emerge as the leading AI technique until a few years ago because of the limited availability of useful data and the shortage of computing power to process that data. Reducing the data-dependency of deep learning is currently among the top priorities of AI researchers.