Deep learning is at least 50 years old, depending on when you want to start counting. Take a look at Ivakhnenko and Lapa's paper "Cybernetic predicting devices"

Deep learning is at least 50 years old, depending on when you want to start counting. Take a look at Ivakhnenko and Lapa's paper "Cybernetic predicting devices" from 1965, that had the first algo. There's been a lot of work since then during the 70s, 80s, 90s, through today. In fact the idea goes back even further to the 1940s, when the first papers were published about how NNs could possibly work. Edit: found this page that has the history: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Deep_Learning http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Deep_Learning