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TechnologySciencePhilosophy

Deep learning works

A neural network wins an image contest in 2012, and the field changes overnight.

When
—
Duration
10 years
Era
Contemporary, Holocene

AlexNet cuts the ImageNet error rate dramatically in 2012 using deep convolutional networks trained on GPUs — the ideas were decades old, but data and parallel computing had finally caught up. AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol in 2016 at a game thought a decade away. The transformer architecture in 2017 then enables large language models, and by 2022 ChatGPT reaches a hundred million users faster than any consumer product in history.

Just before

Just after