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To me the main accomplishments which led to the beginning of the current AI summer in 2012 are:

1. Convnet (Lecun) 2. LSTM (Schmidhuber) 3. Scaling up the convnet to win ILSVRC (Hinton)

Strictly speaking it was just 1 and 3 which jumpstarted the revolution in computer vision, but the importance of LSTM for sequence modelling (language and speech) is hard to overestimate.

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1. Schmidhuber's Sec. XVIII points out that the basic convnet architecture with convolutional and downsampling layers is actually due to Fukushima (1979). In 1987, NNs with convolutions were combined by Waibel with weight sharing and backpropagation, before LeCun.

3. Sec. D and XIV say that the convnet was scaled up already in 2011 through the DanNet from Schmidhuber's lab. DanNet was the first convnet to win a computer vision contest. It also was the first convnet to achieve superhuman performance and had a "monopoly on winning CV competitions." It won 4 CV contests before Hinton's AlexNet won ILSVRC.

It's true. I checked the references.

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