We Almost Gave Up On Building Artificial Brains - The Crux

Today artificial neural networks are making art, writing speeches, identifying faces and even driving cars. It feels as if we're riding the wave of a novel technological era, but the current rise in neural networks is actually a renaissance of sorts. It may be hard to believe, but artificial intelligence researchers were already beginning to see the promise in neural networks during World War II in their mathematical models. But by the 1970s, the field was ready to give up on them entirely. "[T]here were no impressive results until computers grew up, that is until the past 10 years," Patrick Henry Winston, a professor at MIT who specializes in artificial intelligence, says. "It remains the most important enabler of deep learning."