Why the Future of Machine Learning is Tiny

When Azeem asked me to give a talk at CogX, he asked me to focus on just a single point that I wanted the audience to take away. A few years ago my priority would have been convincing people that deep learning was a real revolution, not a fad, but there have been enough examples of shipping products that that question seems answered. I knew this was true before most people not because I'm any kind of prophet with deep insights, but because I'd had a chance to spend a lot of time running hands-on experiments with the technology myself. I could be confident of the value of deep learning because I had seen with my own eyes how effective it was across a whole range of applications, and knew that the only barrier to seeing it deployed more widely was how long it takes to get from research to deployment. Instead I chose to speak about another trend that I am just as certain about, and will have just as much impact, but which isn't nearly as well known.