[zwieback]

Decades ago I played around with neural nets but was frustrated because I either had to preprocess and normalize my inputs to the point where I didn't need a network anymore or I had to train a large network with so much data that it was not practical.

Having a cookbook approach with a catchy name and orders of magnitude more processing power have revived neural nets and now they are finally doing something useful.

Now everyone is jumping on the bandwagon so the field is progressing very quickly. Just because it's hyped doesn't mean it's not worth giving it a second look (although I'm still on the sidelines myself.)