A lot of the excitement in AI has focused on deep learning, a machine learning technique that was popularized by a now famous 2012 Google project that used a giant cluster of computers to learn to identify cats in YouTube videos. 

Deep learning is a descendent of neural networks, a technology that dates back to the 1940s. It was brought back to life by a combination of factors, including new algorithms, cheap parallel computation, and the widespread availability of large data sets.

The computing industry progresses in two mostly independent cycles: financial and product cycles.

 Financial markets get a lot of attention. They tend to fluctuate unpredictably and sometimes wildly. The product cycle by comparison gets relatively little attention, even tho...