> highlighted the practicality and utility of running large scale neural nets on affordable hardware
I always wondered if it weren't crypto and the ALUs those algos ran on that hit the green button ...
I always wondered if it weren't crypto and the ALUs those algos ran on that hit the green button ...
The existence of cheap parallel processing was certainly a necessary enabler for large neural networks to take off.
I don't know who else may have experimented with using GPUs for neural nets before 2012 (not so easy since it required hand coding everything in raw CUDA - no framework support), but AlexNet drew a lot of attention (it was a very dramatic win of the ImageNet 2012 competition - the first neural net entrant, and a win by a very large margin), and large neural net research just accelerated from there.