I appreciate the debunking of hype, but there has been a genuine breakthrough in machine learning that has led to amazing results in image recognition, speech recognition, OCR, and translation.
Geoff Hinton discovered that neural nets could be trained in a greedy, layer-wise fashion (https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/fastnc.pdf). Neural nets were previously limited to two or three layers, and now they can be deeper. This moved some problems from the realm of "too hard" to merely "hard".
There's a lot of noise and hype and businesses trying to sell crap marketed as "AI". But behind all that, there is something truly amazing. I don't normally comment, but I felt like this piece missed that, and I think it's a shame. The positive thing behind all of this hype is so much more fun than complaining about the hype.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
