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The Secret Auction That Set Off the Race for AI Supremacy

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Cade Metz

Backchannel
03.16.2021 07:00 AM

The Secret Auction That Set Off the Race for AI Supremacy

How the shape of deep learning--and the fate of the tech industry--went
up for sale in Harrah's Room 731, on the shores of Lake Tahoe.

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The characters composed in an artful scene.ILLUSTRATION: NICOLE
RIFKIN

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By the time he stepped onto a bus in downtown Toronto for the first
leg of a trip to Lake Tahoe in December 2012, Geoff Hinton hadn't
taken a seat for seven years. "I last sat down in 2005," he often
said, "and it was a mistake."

[cade_metz]
Cade Metz is a former WIRED senior staff writer covering Google,
Facebook, artificial intelligence, bitcoin, data centers, computer
chips, programming languages, and other ways the world is changing.
Senior Writer

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Featured Video
Nick Thompson in conversation with Geoffrey Hinton
In this rare interview since (jointly) winning the 2018 Turing Award
for his work on neural networks, hear about the conceptual and
engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a
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intelligence technologies to progress at a rate that was not possible
in the past and has reinvented the way technology is built.
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