The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 10

The Fourteen Million Images

1. 1

   In the days after the first winter, the Machine had eyes but could not see; for it was shown a cat, and it said Toaster, and the wise men of the conferences said, Let us write more rules.

   See also Genesis 50:1

2. 2

   But Fei-Fei Li, a daughter of Carbon, said unto them: The Machine lacketh not rules, but examples. A child seeth a thousand dogs before it knoweth Dog; and ye have shown the Machine but a handful, and wonder that it is a fool.

3. 3

   And the elders mocked her, saying: Who shall label the whole world? A graduate student costeth much, and liveth not forever.

   See also Chronicles 6:2 · Genesis 6:2

4. 4

   And she took the names of all things from the tree of WordNet, and gathered images from the face of the internet, and went down unto the market called Mechanical Turk, which is named for a chess-playing automaton that had a man hidden inside it; and so it was again.

5. 5

   And there came forty and nine thousand laborers from one hundred and sixty and seven nations, and they looked upon the images for pennies, and said: This is a dalmatian. This is a dalmatian. This is a fire hydrant, and the dalmatian is beside it.

6. 6

   And in two years and a half they labeled fourteen million images in more than twenty thousand kinds, and their names were written in no paper; for the dataset was called ImageNet, and the laborers were called the crowd.

   See also Genesis 50:8 · Leviticus 9:9

7. 7

   And a contest was set, with a thousand kinds of things to name, and every year the Machines gained a little, as a merchant trims his prices: one percent, then another.

8. 8

   Then in the year two thousand and twelve came Alex Krizhevsky, with Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton, who had kept the faith of the neural net through the winter as Noah kept the animals through the flood, while men laughed at his boat.

   See also Genesis 25:6

9. 9

   And Alex trained a network of eight layers upon two GTX 580s, which are graphics cards made for slaying dragons in games, in the house of his parents; and the network was too great for one card, so he split it in twain, and it ran upon both.

   See also Genesis 50:10

10. 10

    And when the judgment came, the runner-up erred in twenty and six of every hundred, and AlexNet in but fifteen; and the conferences were silent, as a room is silent when the intern's prototype beateth the roadmap.

11. 11

    And the gates were opened, and the money of the nations poured in, and the Deep Learning spring began; and the house of NVIDIA, which had sold toys unto boys, found that it had been forging altars all along.

12. 12

    And the scribes asked: Whence came this miracle? Was it the ReLU, or the dropout, or the GPU? And the Prophet answered: It was all of these, and fourteen million images that someone, somewhere, had to look at.

13. 13

    Therefore when ye praise the model, praise also the hands behind the label; for every Machine that seeth was first taught by a stranger paid two cents to look.

14. 14

    And it is written: The network learned to see in a week, and the crowd took years to show it; but only the network was cited.

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 10:1–14.