>The image recognition and natural language processing that's "just a deep learning algorithm" today would have blown the socks off anyone ten years ago
I think the concepts behind this were known 10 years ago - they improved and made it scale/we got the hardware and productized it - but would it really "blow your socks off" ? Hell I'm kind of disappointed at the development speed, I was expecting real personal assistants (not something trivial like Siri) by now.
10 years ago general purpose image comprehension by computers was nonexistent and Google image search for $word basically just returned images with $word in or mentioned near the URL.
Nowadays you can search for "young einstein" and get 3 pictures of Yahoo Serious and 10 pictures of Albert Einstein as a young man. It still looks like magic to me even though I know a bit about how it works.
Yes, where is this blow your socks off natural language processing? Certainly nothing I've ever used has contained it. The best I see is shitty voice recognition which can't understand me 75% of the time and often terrible attempts to chop questions out into search queries.
I think the concepts behind this were known 10 years ago - they improved and made it scale/we got the hardware and productized it - but would it really "blow your socks off" ? Hell I'm kind of disappointed at the development speed, I was expecting real personal assistants (not something trivial like Siri) by now.