Comment by jhartmann

Well I think a big part of this is that right now we have finally gotten to where the algorithms + the required computing power are starting to become more widely available. Cheap graphics cards or things like Intel's Phi + techniques like drop out to prevent overfitting are really enabling much more sophisticated things to be done in a reasonable wall time. Granted multilayer neural networks aren't a free lunch that will solve everything, but there are large classes of problems that are falling to these techniques all the time. We are also finding that Neural Networks scale very well to very large architectures, better than some of the other techniques. I understand we should be careful not to overhype since we have seen previous excitement cause a mass exodus from this research before. I however think people like Hinton were always right, and this was awesome stuff. We just couldn't really take advantage of it because we could never train it for long enough and we hadn't learned how to do things efficiently yet.