🔗 Timothy B. Lee: How computers got shockingly good at recognizing images
Prior to 2012, deep neural networks were something of a backwater in the machine learning world. But then Krizhevsky and his colleagues at the University of Toronto submitted an entry to a high-profile image recognition contest that was dramatically more accurate than anything that had been developed before. Almost overnight, deep neural networks became the leading technique for image recognition.
I've known the buzzword "neural networks" for years but this is the first article I've read where I came out the other side feeling that I finally understood what it meant.