The evolution of machine learning

Catherine Dong is a summer associate at Bloomberg Beta and will be working at Facebook as a machine learning engineer. Major tech companies have actively reoriented themselves around AI and machine learning: Google is now "AI-first," Uber has ML running through its veins, and internal AI research labs keep popping up. They're pouring resources and attention into convincing the world that the machine intelligence revolution is arriving now. They tout deep learning, in particular, as the breakthrough driving this transformation and powering new self-driving cars, virtual assistants, and more. Despite this hype around the state of the art, the state of the practice is less futuristic.