I was in college and interested in neural nets when this was written, and as it happens later graduated and worked with the author of this post. In academia at

I was in college and interested in neural nets when this was written, and as it happens later graduated and worked with the author of this post. In academia at the time, I believe neural nets were seen as a fading trend, something that was a cute idea but wasn’t destined to work out because they didn’t work well enough and even if they did we didn’t have the compute for anything useful. Personally, I was fascinated, and I know several other people who kept hope as well, one who is now quite a well known AI / neural nets researcher. I didn’t pursue neural nets personally, but I did keep using related genetic algorithms and artificial evolution, which I think was viewed with the same mix of skepticism generally, with pockets of enthusiasts. Gates in the story was probably sharing what he’d been hearing from academics. Lawrence (author of the post) is an incredibly smart person, and I have no doubt was able to see past what many of the researchers were saying. BTW, I recently happened across a paper from 1967 (53 years ago) that mentions neural networks in passing as if it was a popular idea at the time - the original paper on the Medial Axis Transform! Scroll to the 2nd page (“364”) near the top: “Consider a continuous isotropic plane (an idealization of an active granular material or a rudimentary neural net) that has the following properties at each point” http://pageperso.lif.univ-mrs.fr/~edouard.thiel/rech/1967-blum.pdf http://pageperso.lif.univ-mrs.fr/~edouard.thiel/rech/1967-bl...