Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A.I. to Google, Facebook, and the World

by Cade Metz

At first, Malik said deep learning would have to master a European dataset called PASCAL. “PASCAL is too small,” Hinton told him. “To make this work, we need a lot of training data. What about ImageNet?” Malik told him they had a deal. ImageNet was an annual contest run by a lab at Stanford,15 about forty miles south of Berkeley. The lab had compiled a vast database of carefully labeled photos, everything from dogs to flowers to cars, and each year, researchers across the globe competed to build a system that could recognize the most images. Excelling at ImageNet, Hinton thought, would certainly clinch the argument. What he didn’t tell Malik was that his lab was already building a neural network for the upcoming competition, and that thanks to two of his students—Ilya Sut skever and Alex Krizhevsky—it was nearly finished.