The Holy Grail of Artificial Intelligence, true “deep” AI, has been 10 years away ever since the Dartmouth Conference in 1956, in the same way that fusion reactors have been 20 years out for the past 50 years. In the meantime, we’ve gone through 2 “AI Winters” and 3 “AI Summers,” as the expectations of investors get lowered to meet the rising actual capabilities of neural nets. The talk will be a brisk tour through the history of neural networks, with particular emphasis on the intuition of how neural networks work.