Advances in deep learning have led Elon Musk and others to start preparing for the AI apocalypse. And indeed, by feeding terabytes into neural networks, computers are now able to understand voices, recognise faces and sift through data with unprecedented accuracy. And yet, advances in so-called unsupervised learning - which finds the structure or relationships in data inputs without training in the way that a child learns from experience - are almost non-existent. In recent years, Yann LeCun of Facebook, Geoffrey Hinton of Google and Yoshua Bengio from the University of Montreal have made significant advances in machine learning through their use of deep neural networks and other learning techniques. For example, Yaniv Taigman, one of my co-founders at face.com (which was acquired by Facebook in June 2012), recently published that the company achieved a 97.25 per cent accuracy rate for face recognition, just 0.25 per cent below human perception.