Geoff Hinton answers this question in episode 6 of the Talking Machines podcast. http://www.thetalkingmachines.com/blog/2015/3/13/how-machine-learning-got-where

Geoff Hinton answers this question in episode 6 of the Talking Machines podcast. http://www.thetalkingmachines.com/blog/2015/3/13/how-machine-learning-got-where-it-is-and-the-future-of-the-field http://www.thetalkingmachines.com/blog/2015/3/13/how-machine... Geoff Hinton had grad students who wanted to work on the problem, but Yann LeCun didn't. "In about 2012, it should have been Yann's group, but Yann was unlucky, he didn't have a student who really wanted to do it. But we had a couple of students who wanted to do it and we took all of Yann's techniques and added some of our own."