THE year Hinton entered the University of Edinburgh, 1971, the British government commissioned a study on the progress of artificial intelligence.11 It proved to be damning. “Most workers in AI research and in related fields confess to a pronounced feeling of disappointment in what has been achieved in the past twenty-five years,”12 the report said. “In no part of the field have the discoveries made so far produced the major impact that was then promised.” So the government cut funding across the field, ushering in what researchers would later call an “AI winter.”
