Recurrent Neural Nets – The Third and Least Appreciated Leg of the AI Stool

Summary: Convolutional Neural Nets are getting all the press but it's Recurrent Neural Nets that are the real workhorse of this generation of AI. We've paid a lot of attention lately to Convolutional Neural Nets (CNNs) as the cornerstone of 2nd gen NNs and spent some time on Spiking Neural Nets (SNNs) as the most likely path forward to 3rd gen, but we'd really be remiss if we didn't stop to recognize Recurrent Neural Nets (RNNs). Because RNNs are solid performers in the 2nd gen NN world and perform many tasks much better than CNNs. These include speech-to-text, language translation, and even automated captioning for images. By count, there are probably more applications for RNNs than for CNNs. On one scale RNNs have much more in common with the larger family of NNs than do CNNs which have very unique architecture.