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

by Cade Metz

Two months earlier, Hinton and his students had changed the way machines saw the world.

They had built

a neural network, a mathematical system modeled on the web of neurons in the brain, and it co...

By the new millennium, most researchers had given up on the idea, convinced it was a technological dead end

Hinton remained one of the few who believed it would one day fulfill its promise,

But in the spring and summer of 2012, Hinton and his two students made a breakthrough: They showed that a neural network could recognize common objects with an accuracy beyond any other technology.

Yu grew up in Communist China, the son of an automobile engineer, and studied in Nanjing and then Munich before moving to Silicon Valley for a job

they shared an unusual interest: neural networks.

rebrand the idea as “deep learning.”

Yu was among those who helped spread the new gospel.

to Baidu, where his research caught the eye of th...

He called it DNNresearch in a nod to the “deep

neural networks”

four names joined the bidding for his new company: Baidu, Google, Microsoft, and a two-year-old start-up

DeepMind,

The auction played out over email,

Hinton hid the identity of each bidder from all the rest.

He ran the auction from his hotel room,

in the Harrah’...

Each day, he set a time for the next rou...

The bids arrived via Gmail, the online email service operated by Google, just because this was where he kept an email account.

the four companies had an hour to raise the buying price

by at least a million dollars.

at the end of the hour, if no one lodged a new bid, the...

At about $22 million, Hinton

temporarily suspended the auction for a discussion with one of the bidders,

Microsoft dropped o...

That left Baidu an...

bids quickly climbed to $40 million,

price hit $44 million, he suspended the bidding again.

Hinton had decided to sell his company to Google—

without pushing the price any higher.

Yu was happy just for Baidu to have taken its place among the bidders.

Hinton stopped the auction because finding the right home for his research was ultimately more important to him than commanding the maximum price.

But Hinton didn’t realize how valuable their idea would prove to be. No one did.

they suddenly and dramatically accelerated the progress of artificial intelligence,

The rise of deep learning marked a fundamental change in the way digital technology was built.

build machines that could learn tasks through their own experiences,

these experiences spanned such enormous amounts of digital information, no human could ever wrap their head around it all.

new breed of ...

more powerful tha...

also more mysterious and unp...

the techn...

was learning the biases of the researcher...

mostly whi...

Kai Yu boarded a plane for Beijing.

ran into a China-born Microsoft researcher named Li Deng,

they danced around

trying to understand what the other knew

both knew that a new competit...