When the door opened, he immediately asked, in his clipped Eastern European accent, if he could join Hinton’s deep learning lab. “Why don’t you make an appointment and we could talk about it?” Hinton said. “Okay,” Sutskever said. “How about now?” So Hinton invited him in. Sutskever was a mathematics student, and in those few minutes, he seemed like a sharp one. Hinton gave him a copy of the backpropagation paper—the paper that had finally revealed the potential of deep neural networks twenty-five years earlier—and told him to come back once he’d read it. Sutskever returned a few days later. “I
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