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I believe the NN/ Deep learning renaissance started around 2011 -- iirc Alex net was released in 2012 and the famous Google's paper on detecting cat on youtube also around that time.

It seems like the drop of costs from 2007 to 2011 is higher than the previous period. What happened in 2007? Or was it just a slow down during the start of 2000s ?

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The drop 2011 was due to GPUs taking over. (See my source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS#Cost_of_computing ) I believe the gaming industry has (indirectly) heavily subsidized AI's progress.

Nevertheless prices still fell by a factor of 16 between just 2000 and 2007. So the 2,000's weren't stagnant.

More like 2006, although there were convnets and other neural nets working well long before then of course. It just took several years for the techniques from the papers in the scientific rivial to make their way into products. The vision community was quite resistant to it, even more than the speech community.

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