As the months passed, another chill settled over the wider world of connectionist research. Pomerleau’s truck could drive itself. Sejnowski’s NETtalk could learn to read aloud. And LeCun’s bank scanner could read handwritten checks. But it was clear the truck couldn’t deal with anything more than private roads and the straight lines of a highway. NETtalk could be dismissed as a party trick. And there were other ways of reading checks. LeCun’s convolutional neural networks didn’t work when analyzing more complex images, like photos of dogs, cats, and cars. It wasn’t clear if they ever would.
