The inside story of how AI got good enough to dominate Silicon Valley

Alex Krizhevsky didn't get into the AI business to change the course of history. Krizhevsky, born in Ukraine but raised in Canada, was just looking to delay getting a coding job when he reached out to Geoff Hinton about doing a computer-science PhD program in AI at the University of Toronto. The fateful moment was when, as a graduate student, Krizhevsky and a fellow student named Ilya Sutskever, decided to enter the ImageNet competition, a test for AI consisting of a huge database of online images. The competition, open to anyone in the world, was to evaluate algorithms designed for large-scale object detection and image classification. The point wasn't just to crown a winner, but to test a hypothesis: with the right algorithm, the massive amount data in the ImageNet database could be the key to unlocking AI's potential.