Five years ago, AI was struggling to identify cats. Now it's trying to tackle 5000 species

In 2012, Google made a breakthrough: It trained its AI to recognize cats in YouTube videos. Google's neural network, software which uses statistics to approximate how the brain learns, taught itself to detect the shapes of cats and humans with more than 70% accuracy. It was a 70% improvement over any other machine learning at the time. Five years later, a contest Google is sponsoring speaks volumes about the field's advancement. Instead of finding cats, researchers will be required to train an AI to identify more than 5000 different species of plants and animals.