When Andrej Karpathy became interested in deep learning, it was a niche area rather than the main focus of AI research.

“stuff that happened I mean AI is actually like so wonderful because there have been a number of I would say seismic shifts That were like the entire field has sort of like suddenly looks a different way Right and I guess I've maybe lived through two or three of those and I still think there will continue to be some because they come with some kind of like almost surprising regularity Well my when my career began of course like when I started to work on deep learning when I became interested in deep learning This was just kind of like by chance of being right next to Jeff Hinton at University of Toronto”

“of Toronto and Jeff Hinton of course is kind of like the godfather figure of AI and he was training all these neural networks and I thought it was incredible and interesting but this was not like the main thing that everyone in AI was doing by far”

“this was a niche little subject on the side that's kind of maybe like the first like dramatic sort of seismic shift that came with the AlexNet and so on”