The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI

by Fei-Fei Li

In yet another twist of fate, the style of number-crunching favored by neural networks is functionally similar to the kind used in rendering the graphics for video games—a multibillion-dollar industry that had been driving the advancement and commercialization of custom hardware since the 1990s, fueling the growth of megabrands like Nvidia, the company at the forefront of the field. By 2012, such hardware—specialized processors known as “graphics processing units,” or GPUs—had attained affordable, consumer-level status. For Hinton’s lab, that meant the silicon needed to bring AlexNet to life was no longer an investment requiring a government grant and construction permits. It was available off the shelf at Best Buy.