Historical milestone · 2012
ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks
Reviewed through September 18, 2026
2012 · Historical milestone
ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks
- Era
- 2010s
- Theme
- Machine-learning foundations
- Evidence form
- Benchmark experiment
- School / paradigm
- Connectionist / supervised deep learning
- Institution / context
- University of Toronto
- Researchers
- Alex Krizhevsky; Ilya Sutskever; Geoffrey Hinton
Researcher index
Geoffrey Hinton
Deep representation learning · CMU / Toronto
Backpropagation and deep belief nets
Why it still matters. Central architect of the connectionist revival and deep learning.
Representative source for this researcher — not necessarily the source of this milestone: https://doi.org/10.1162/neco.2006.18.7.1527 (opens in a new tab)
School of thought
Connectionism
Matched on representative researcher.
Cognition emerges from learned distributed representations and weighted interactions among simple units.
Critique. Opacity, data/compute demands, unstable optimization, and weak guarantees or causal grounding.
Modern descendants. Foundation models, multimodal networks, representation learning, and differentiable agents.
Understand
Plain-language record, transferred from the reviewed source module.
Theory or experimental setup. Trained a large convolutional network on ImageNet using GPUs, rectified linear units, dropout, and data augmentation.
Result / historical claim. Reported a large classification improvement over prior competition systems and made GPU-trained deep vision a practical scaling path.
Apply
Professional implication, only where the reviewed record states one.
The checked-in record does not state a separate professional application for this entry. The topic page places it in the wider research lineage: .
Verify
Evidence status, stated limitations, and the external sources this record actually carries.
Evidence form. Benchmark experiment
Limitation / debate. The result depended on a large labeled benchmark, substantial compute, and vision-specific inductive bias.
Source status. This milestone row does not carry a primary-source URL in the approved export, and we do not have a verified link for it in our own research. We do not guess one.
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Reproduce
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Cite or share
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