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

by Cade Metz

Sitting at his desk inside Chauffeur, Krizhevsky was at the heart of this AI boom, but he didn’t see his role as all that important, and he didn’t see any of it as artificial intelligence. It was deep learning, and deep learning was just mathematics, pattern recognition, or, as he called it, “nonlinear regression.” These techniques had been around for decades. It was merely that people like him had come along at the right time, when there was enough data and enough processing power to make it all work. The technologies he built were in no way intelligent. They worked only in very particular situations. “Deep learning should not be called AI,” Krizhevsky says. “I went to grad school for curve setting, not AI.” What he did, first at Google Brain and then inside the self-driving car project, was apply the math to new situations. This was very different from any effort to re-create the brain—and far from vague fears that machines would someday spin outside our control. It was computer science.