What is deep learning, and why should you care about it?

Whether it's Google's headline-grabbing DeepMind AlphaGo victory, or Apple's weaving of "using deep neural network technology" into iOS 10, deep learning and artificial intelligence are all the rage these days, promising to take applications to new heights in how they interact with us mere mortals. To go deeper (yes, I went there) on the subject, I reached out to the team at the deep learning-focused company Skymind, creators of Deep Learning For Java (DL4J), and authors of the recently released O'Reilly book Deep Learning: A Practitioner's Approach, Josh Patterson and Adam Gibson. Josh and Adam offer us a gentle introduction to the subject in this interview, as well as insight into how they are building an open source-based business around deep learning. For the uninitiated, what is deep learning (DL) and why should I care about it? Adam Gibson (AG): Deep learning is just another term for neural networks, a set of algorithms that have been around for decades. For a long time people were skeptical about them, but as chips got more powerful and as we gathered more data to train them on, deep neural nets started breaking records. We're hitting expert human accuracy on a lot of problem sets, with accuracy rates in the high 90s, which is a quantum leap over other algorithms. So if you have a problem that matters to your business, you can probably attach a dollar value to that improvement in accuracy, and if you're a large business, that value can be huge. It's a competitive edge with a big impact on margins.Josh Patterson (JP): To build on what Adam said, with deep learning we're moving from manual feature creation to automated feature learning. The trick with deep learning is to recognize the input data type and match it to the correct deep network architecture to enable robust automated feature learning. An example is how automatically learn the features in complex image data, where historically this was harder for other machine learning methods. What problems are DL best suited for?