Tracing AI History: The First Modern Backprop CNN Predates Common Knowledge

SchmidhuberAI · x · 2026-08-14

Jürgen Schmidhuber shared a discussion on early AI history, highlighting that the first modern backprop-trained CNN for vision was actually published in Japan back in 1988 by Chinese researcher Wei Zhang and colleagues.

Wei later brought this technology to Silicon Valley, earning FDA approval in 1998 for radiology's first AI application, which now reads over 10 million mammograms annually in the US.

Related event: Schmidhuber Traces First Modern CNN to 1988 Japan Paper(4 posts)→

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