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

by Cade Metz

Their companies would have to answer Goog...

the beginning of a global...

the machine was just one piece of a mainframe computer

that fanned across the room like a multipiece furniture set.

$2 million machine ran calculations for the Weather Bureau,

Rosenblatt

explained it, the machine had learned this skill on its own,

He called it a Perceptron.

The Perceptron was one of the first neural networks,

Rosenblatt was trained in psychology,

McCarthy,

eventually took his research to Stanford University

Herbert Simon and Ala...

at Carnegie...

Minsky, who settled at the Massachusetts Institu...

Minsky became an AI evangelist, but his evangelism didn’t extend to neural networks.

neural network was just one way of building artificial intelligence,

Minsky was part of a larger backlash against Rosenblatt’s ideas.

insisted the Perceptron was not an attempt at artificial intelligence—

investigating the physical structures and neurodynamic principles which underlie ‘natural intelligence,’

determine the physical conditions for the emergence of various psychological properties.”

From the beginning, the lines that separated artificial intelligence from computer science, psychology, and neuroscience were blurred

the path to re-creating the brain

turned out to be very long.

In 1966,

“pattern recognition”—

Rosenblatt viewed the Perceptron as a model of the brain, others saw it as a means of pattern recognition.

commentators ...

Rosenblatt and Minsky loc...

John Munson

worked at SRI,

The Perceptron, they showed, couldn’t deal with what mathematicians called “exclusive-or,”

Following Minsky’s lead, most researchers embraced what was called “symbolic AI.”

Rosenblatt aimed to build a system that learned behavior on its own in the same way the brain did.

it relied on a vast array of interconnecte...

Rosenblatt’s system was much simpler t...

Rosenblatt tried pushing the Perceptron beyond images.

mid-1980s,

twenty academics

Marvin Minsky still reigned over the international community of AI researchers.

Geoff Hinton

handed each o...

paper des...

the Boltzmann ...

a new kind of neural network, designed to overcome the flaws Minsky pinpointed in the Percep...

neural networks had fallen from favor in the wake of Minsky’s book

Hinton,

at Carnegie...

had kept the faith, building the Boltzmann Machine in ...

Terry Sej...