Hinton and his students had used a modified version of LeCun’s creation from the late 1980s: the convolutional neural network. But for some students in LeCun’s lab, it was also a disappointment. After Hinton and his students published the AlexNet paper, LeCun’s students felt a deep sense of regret descend on their own lab—a sense that after thirty years of struggle, they had stumbled at the last hurdle. “Toronto students are faster than NYU students,” LeCun told Efros and Malik as they discussed the paper later that night.
