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

by Cade Metz

The University of Toronto, Hinton liked to say, didn’t even have to pay for the electricity. Each week, Krizhevsky would start the training, and with each passing hour, on the computer screen in his bedroom, he could watch its progress—a black screen filled with white numbers counting upward. At the end of the week, he would test the system on a new set of images. It would fall short of the goal, so then he would hone the GPU code and adjust the weights of the neurons and train for another week. And another. And another. Each week, too, Hinton would oversee a gathering of the students in his lab. It operated like a Quaker meeting. People would just sit there until someone decided to speak up and share what they were working on and what progress they were seeing. Krizhevsky rarely spoke up. But when Hinton coaxed the results out of him, a real sense of excitement would build in the room. “Every week, he’d try to get Alex Krizhevsky to say a little bit more,” remembers Alex Graves, another member of the lab in those years. “He knew how big this was.” By the fall, Krizhevsky’s neural network had passed the current state of the art. It was nearly twice as accurate as the next best system on Earth.16 And it won ImageNet.