Geoffrey Hinton, the 'godfather' of deep learning, on AlphaGo (Macleans)

Excerpt from a wide-ranging interview

"Q: Beyond games, then—what might come next for AI?
A: It depends who you talk to. My belief is that we’re not going to get human-level abilities until we have systems that have the same number of parameters in them as the brain. So in the brain, you have connections between the neurons called synapses, and they can change. All your knowledge is stored in those synapses. You have about 1,000-trillion synapses—10 to the 15, it’s a very big number. So that’s quite unlike the neural networks we have right now. They’re far, far smaller, the biggest ones we have right now have about a billion synapses. That’s about a million times smaller than the brain.

Q: Do you dare predict a timeline for that?
A: More than five years. I refuse to say anything beyond five years because I don’t think we can see much beyond five years. And you look at these past predictions like there’s only a market in the world for five computers [as allegedly said by IBM founder Thomas Watson] and you realize it’s not a good idea to predict too far into the future."

(p.s. there's an argument that Watson Sr. was right, if he actually did make the "... world market for maybe five computers" assertion in 1943; the five computers are today known as Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and the NSA...)

Geoffrey Hinton, the 'godfather' of deep learning, on AlphaGo