Understanding AI

So the AI boom of the last 12 years was made possible by three visionaries who pursued unorthodox ideas in the face of widespread criticism. One was Geoffrey Hinton, a University of Toronto computer scientist who spent decades promoting neural networks despite near-universal skepticism. The second was Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, who recognized early that GPUs could be useful for more than just graphics.

The third was Fei-Fei Li. She created an image dataset that seemed ludicrously large to most of her colleagues. But it turned out to be essential for demonstrating the potential of neural networks trained on GPUs.