AlexNet Wins ImageNet Challenge

On September 30, 2012, a deep convolutional neural network called AlexNet, developed by Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto, won the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge with an error rate nearly half that of its closest competitor. The result ended a decade of skepticism about neural networks and triggered a fundamental shift in the AI field toward deep learning. Within two years, nearly every major technology company had retooled its AI research around deep neural networks. The moment is widely regarded as the beginning of the modern AI era.