Deep Learning Comes Full Circle

Artificial intelligence has been borrowing from the brain since its early days, when computer scientists and psychologists developed algorithms called neural networks that loosely mimicked the brain. Those algorithms were frequently criticized for being biologically implausible – the "neurons" in neural networks were, after all, gross simplifications of the real neurons that make up the brain. They just wanted systems that worked, so they extended neural network models in whatever way made the algorithm best able to carry out certain tasks, culminating in what is now called deep learning.