The promise of deep learning

 As noted already, many of the models we will survey in the book are deep, multilevel neural networks. The last 15 years have seen a renaissance in the development of deep learning models for image classification, natural language processing and understanding, and reinforcement learning. These advances were enabled by breakthroughs in traditional challenges in tuning and optimizing very complex models, combined with access to larger datasets, distributed computational power in the cloud, and frameworks such as TensorFlow make it easier to prototype and reproduce research.