The modern era takes hold – 1997-2005

AI further entered the public discourse in 1997 when IBM's Deep Blue system beat world champion chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. Within a year, a former student of Geoffrey Hinton's, Yann LeCun, developed the Convolutional Neural Network at Bell Labs, which was enabled by the backpropagation algorithm and years of research into computer vision tasks. Hochreiter and Schmidhuber invented the first memory unit, the long short-term memory unit (LSTM), which is still used today for sequence modeling.

ANNs still had a way to go. Computing and storage limitations prevented these networks from scaling, and other methods such as support vector machines (SVMs) were developed as alternatives.