Oof this article is atrocious, ill-informed hype. Most of it is so high-level that it's essentially a paraphrase of Wikipedia, with some ridiculously specific details like gradient boosting and sigmoid activation functions sprinkled in for extra confusion.

>The breakthrough in deep learning is to model the brain, not the world... Artificial, software-based calculators that approximate the function of neurons in a brain are connected together.

This comparison is criminally incorrect.

And don't even get me started on figures 2+3 - 2 adjacent figures, with different horizontal and vertical scales, that use highly technical terms without introduction?? It's really hard to see how a lay-reader could get anything useful out of those plots.

Despite the author's promise to "get behind the headlines" and "cut through the hype", this is just a regurgitation of "intro to machine learning" cliches.