The AI revolution has mostly been a hardware revolution. I studied AI in the 1990s, so I knew about neural networks and backpropagation, so when suddenly everyb

The AI revolution has mostly been a hardware revolution. I studied AI in the 1990s, so I knew about neural networks and backpropagation, so when suddenly everybody was talking about "Deep Learning", I wanted to know what was different about it. Turns out: not much. It's mostly just plain old backpropagation on a much larger scale because we have more powerful hardware. Of course there have still been plenty of meaningful innovations, like the transformer/attention thing, but it's mostly the fact that affordable graphics cars offer massively-parallel floating point calculations which turns out to be exactly what we need to scale this up. That and the sheer amount of data that's become available in the age of the Internet.