At Caltech, I took a class in a new topic - "neural networks" - taught by the inimitable John Hopfield. I found the topic fascinating, following up with a seminar (which included hearing a talk by Terry Sejnowski*, sitting with Bela Julesz**, and meeting many other now-luminaries***). After watching the infighting at the first IJCNN in San Diego, I decided to rejoin Bell Labs and return to Telecom, but I never stopped being fascinated by this technology, through AI Winters and the emergence of today's LLMs. As an outsider, I get to look at the technology and business of AI from a bit of a different perspective. Here's are some selections.

*For those who are unfamiliar, Terry Sejnowski used machine learning (back propagation) to "teach a computer to read aloud." That's right - he created an AI Text-To-Speech system. In 1986. 

**For those who are unfamiliar, Bela Julesz did fundamental research into visual perception, including elegant experiments with the Random Dot Stereogram. That work underlies today's Virtual Reality.

***I specifically remember Christof Koch in biological neural nets and Demetri Psaltis in optical neural nets. Carver Mead was doing analog electronics inspired by the retina's neural networks, work that led to the FOVEON camera.