The business value of neural networks

Neural networks are the backbone of algorithms that predict consumer demand, estimate freight arrival time, and more. At a high level, they're computing systems loosely inspired by the biological networks in the brain. Neural networks began rising to prominence in 2010, when it was shown that GPUs make backpropagation feasible for complex neural network architectures. Between 2009 and 2012, neural networks began winning prizes in contests, approaching human-level performance on various tasks, initially in pattern recognition and machine learning. Around this time, neural networks won multiple competitions in handwriting recognition without prior knowledge of the languages to be learned.