The corporate forces that helped shape AI - Marketplace

"Artificial intelligence" is now a household term, whether it's powering driving directions, spotting tumors in cancer patients or driving big discussions over ethics, bias, autonomous weapons or the future of work. But despite the fact that the first neural network was created in the late 1950s, a lot of what I just described has taken place over only about 10 years. In his new book, "Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World," New York Times tech correspondent Cade Metz writes about the history of AI and the corporate forces that have shaped it since the mid-2000s. He told me AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton really rebranded neural networks as "deep learning," and that happened just as a bunch of other factors were coming together. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.