LinkLog: Deep Learning and the Google Brain

From The Man Behind the Google Brain

With Deep Learning, Ng says, you just give the system a lot of data “so it can discover by itself what some of the concepts in the world are.” Last year, one of his algorithms taught itself torecognize cats after scanning millions of images on the internet. The algorithm didn’t know the word “cat” — Ng had to supply that — but over time, it learned to identify the furry creatures we know as cats, all on its own.

This approach is inspired by how scientists believe that humans learn. As babies, we watch our environments and start to understand the structure of objects we encounter, but until a parent tells us what it is, we can’t put a name to it.