7 Observations About AI In 2019

After years in the (mostly Canadian) wilderness followed by seven years of plenty, Deep Learning was officially recognized as the "dominant" AI paradigm and "a critical component of computing," with its three key proponents, Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio, receiving the Turing Award in March 2019. Turing Award winners (from left to right) Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun, and Geoffrey Hinton at the ... [ ] ReWork Deep Learning Summit, Montreal, October 2017. In October 2012, a deep neural network achieved an error rate of only 16% in the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge, a significant improvement over the 25% error rate achieved by the best entry the year before. Yann LeCun: "The difference there was so great that a lot of people, you could see a big switch in their head going'clunk.' Now they were convinced;" Geoffrey Hinton: "Until we could produce results that were clearly better than the current state of the art, people were very skeptical;" Yoshua Bengio: "[Anyone hoping to make the next Turing-winning breakthrough in AI] should not follow the trend--which right now is deep learning." Deep Learning is a "critical component of computing"… or biology? As customary for Turing Awards laureates, Hinton, LeCun and Bengio delivered the A. M. Turing Lecture.