Dahl pushed Hinton’s speech prototype beyond the performance of anything else under development at the company. What he and Mohamed and Hinton showed was that a neural network could sift through a sea of very noisy speech and somehow find the stuff that mattered, the patterns that no human engineer could ever pinpoint on their own, the telltale signs that distinguished one subtle sound from another, one word from another. It was an inflection point in the long history of artificial intelligence. In a matter of months, a professor and his two graduate students matched a system that one of the
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