How a stubborn computer scientist accidentally launched the deep learning boom

Fei-Fei Li, a computer science professor, created ImageNet - a dataset of 14 million labeled images across 22,000 categories. Despite skepticism, Li pursued the project for over two years. In 2012, a neural network trained on ImageNet achieved groundbreaking performance in image recognition, sparking the deep learning boom. ImageNet's success, combined with advancements in neural networks and GPU computing, drove significant progress in artificial intelligence over the past decade.