Comment by mockingbirdz

Judging just by the number of people doing the CS231n course online http://cs231n.stanford.edu/, the number of would-be practitioners who have the skills is definitely increasing. CS231n is a graduate level class and is conceptually harder than a "flavour of the month" app. Add to that the number of articles being published on DIY experiments with AI, I think the 10K number seems small. Do these qualify as "serious" research? Maybe not, but they are not all trivial.