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>but they wouldn't have been possible without the academics that kept working on neural networks while that field was actively scorned during the 90s-2000s AI winter

The bottleneck was on compute power. Industry would have also worked on neural networks once the compute power for it existed.



I think the point is that universities and public research broadly speaking tolerate a lot of risk that private institution are not built to shoulder. I'm no AI historian but ANNs were an intellectual backwater after the 1st/2nd AI Winter and the only entities "foolish" enough to keep investing in them were Canadian public research universities. If it weren't for Hinton's dogged quasi-autistic special obsession with them ... no for profit entity would have bothered to invest in "computer power".




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