Is There a Smarter Path to Artificial Intelligence? Some Experts Hope So

For the past five years, the hottest thing in artificial intelligence has been a branch known as deep learning. The grandly named statistical technique, put simply, gives computers a way to learn by processing massive amounts of data. Thanks to deep learning, computers can easily identify faces and recognize spoken words, making other forms of humanlike intelligence suddenly seem within reach. Companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft have poured money into deep learning. And the technology's perception and pattern-matching abilities are being applied to improve progress in fields such as drug discovery and self-driving cars.