Tomaso Poggio is a Professor at MIT and co-director of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines.
He sent the following comment:
The main remark is that the real breakthrough did not happen with deep learning but rather with machine learning about 25-30 years earlier, when the central paradigm in computer science changed dramatically from programming to training. It was such a radical revolution that most of the key figures—Vapnik, Fukushima, Hinton, Baldi, Schoelkopf, myself—were not computer scientists! In machine learning, until around 2010, the best architectures were shallow networks (Support Vector Machines, Radial Basis Functions). The first successes in biology, generative graphics, finance, autonomous driving, and vision took place in the 1990s.
Tomaso has also played a role in this history as one of the initial investors in DeepMind. This is the translation of a relevant paragraph from one of its books:
"Around that time, a brilliant young visiting scientist from London arrived in my laboratory, someone who had a lot to do with games. Demis Hassabis had already been a chess prodigy at age four, and by 17—having finished high school two years ahead of his peers—he had co-designed and programmed Theme Park, a video game that went on to sell more than ten million copies.
After meeting Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, at a Google-organized conference, and finding that other major investors were also interested, Demis realized his dream of founding an artificial intelligence startup focused on gaming was feasible. His idea was that gaming could be the initial goal, with the eventual aim of tackling more significant scientific problems. After a long discussion, Demis asked me to join the first round of investment. Hesitant, I invited him to dinner at our home to talk more about the project, although my secret intention was to introduce him to Barbara. After dinner, Barbara had no doubts: "Go ahead and invest," she told me. Thus, with my very modest contribution, DeepMind—the mind of "deep" learning—was born, starting as a small group of computer scientists and software engineers confined to a London office.
The turning point came in 2014, when Google acquired DeepMind and, notably, the brilliant minds working there, beginning with Demis and co-founders Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman."
translated from
Poggio, T. & Magrini, M. Cervelli menti algoritmi. (Sperling & Kupfer, 2023).
at <https://www.sperling.it/libri/cervelli-menti-algoritmi-marco-magrini>