Scenes from 2010 Marking the Tide of the Future - AI Turning Point and the Embryo of Global Competition (2010-2025)

Scenes from 2010 Marking the Tide of the Future - AI Turning Point and the Embryo of Global Competition (2010-2025)
The period around 2010 was a "quiet critical point" in the history of artificial intelligence. Until then, AI had been studied only in detail by specialists and had been bouncing between waves of public expectation and disappointment, but the situation slowly began to change around this time. It was in the early 2010s that the old and new techniques of deep learning suddenly became a reality, thanks to the combination of factors such as massive amounts of digital data, increasingly powerful GPUs, and the maturity of the Internet infrastructure.
Symbolic of this was the 2012 ImageNet competition. AlexNet, a deep convolutional network developed by a team at the University of Toronto, dramatically reduced the error rate of image recognition by more than 10% over previous methods, shocking the research community into believing that the era of deep learning had begun. This model, which was trained using two NVIDIA GTX580 GPUs, which at the time were designed for gaming, was a turning point that NVIDIA itself later positioned as "the starting point of today's AI.
This shift was not limited to mere algorithmic improvements. In the mid-2010s, governments and tech giants in the U.S., China, and Europe began to formulate AI strategies one after another, and to invest in research, startups, and talent acquisition, In the 2020s, this competition became more acute, with the core theme of national strategies being which region would dominate in terms of both research results and commercialization.
In retrospect, the signs around 2010 were not limited to "the success of one paper or one model. It was a time when the underlying computational resources and data environment were in place, algorithms were emerging to take advantage of them, and companies and nations, keenly aware of the results, began to steer strategic investments and policies. How to evaluate this "quiet inflection point" in the 2010s and the lessons to be learned will be an important perspective for the coming decade. The key perspective for the coming decade will be how to evaluate this "quiet inflection point" of the 2010s and what lessons it holds.