Before ChatGPT, there was AlexNet: the AI code that started it all is now open source

The big picture: You can't go five minutes these days without hearing about AI this and AI that. But have you ever wondered how we got here? The credit largely goes to a groundbreaking neural network from 2012 called AlexNet. While it didn't cause an immediate sensation, it ultimately became the foundation for the deep learning revolution we're experiencing today. Now, after years of negotiations, the original source code has finally been released to the public.

That's thanks to a collaborative effort between the Computer History Museum and Google. The source code, originally written by University of Toronto graduate student Alex Krizhevsky, has now been uploaded to GitHub.

AlexNet was a neural network that marked a major breakthrough in a computer's ability to recognize and classify images. By 2012, the theory behind neural networks – including the pivotal backpropagation algorithm – had been around for decades. However ...