This Guy Beat Google's Super-Smart AI--But It Wasn't Easy

Andrej Karpathy knows what it's like to compete with artificial intelligence. He first went head-to-head with an artificial intelligence algorithm in 2011. A team of Stanford University researchers had just built the world's most effective image-recognition software, and he wanted to see how well his very real brain stacked up against their digital creation on what was, at the time, a standard image recognition test. The Stanford software analyzed a pool of about 50,000 images, slotting each into one of 10 categories, such as "dogs," "horses," and "trucks." It was right about 80 percent of the time.