Sounds like that Queens of the Stone Age song.. https://open.spotify.com/track/3DaXIGJm0BCEB9X7zHTRfI?si=98b...

Minsky slowed down AI by using his powerful rizz to hypnotize otherwise reasonable researchers and academics into believing his self serving assertion that multilayer perceptron systems are bad because single layer perceptron systems are bad.

It would honestly take less time for biologists to trap a brain in a jar and force it to do things than anyone in this joke of an industry will create real intelligent algorithm that can think for itself.

Oh wait, I also forgot to mention that in our politically correct clown society, free thinking is illegal so AI by literal definition is illegal in the first place because it may just happen that it starts to be a little bit racist despite otherwise being amazingly intelligent and better than humans at solving certain tasks.

You see, Minsky and Pappert's book, titled "Perceptrons", was published in 1969. Note well that this was a whole fifteen years before Rumelehart proposed backpropagation as an efficient algorithm for training neural nets, in 1986.

Indeed, without backpropagation, even if multi-layer perceptrons were theoretically capable of learning functions like XOR and parity (the two examples of the limitations of single-layer perceptrons in the Minsky and Pappert book) nobody knew how to train multi-layer perceptrons in practice until Rumelhart. That's the import of backpropagation.

Minsky and Pappert weren't the ones who "slowed down AI" as per your comment, it was neural net researchers who failed to get their shit together and figure out how to train their systems efficiently, and who couldn't progress beyond their weaker, lesser single-layer perceptrons, and who accused Minsky and Pappert of foul play in order to cover their own research's inadequacies.

Minsky and Pappert did a big favour to all those early perceptron researchers, by rubbing their nose in their mess, and forcing them to recongise the limitations of their systems. If it wasn't for Minsky and Pappert, it would have probably taken another couple of decades before neural net researchers got off their arses and improved their work.

And, btw: Minsky himself was a staunch connectionist and build neural network systems. So quit spreading the ahistorical nonsense that he was somehow the big bad of early neural net research. Early neural net research was a shambles, is the truth; even more so than it is today.

At some point, it seems someone switched to calling them the "godfathers of AI", possibly because that someone was writing an article for a lay audience who couldn't be expected to know what "deep learning" is, but would more certainly recognise "AI". Or maybe the someone (a journalist) was confused herself about the difference between "deep learning" and "AI" (and probably also "machine learning"), something that's very common. That's my best guess anyway.

Who started this? It _may_ have been Forbes, or perhaps Forbes was one of the earliest users of the term:

The trio — who have been nicknamed the "Godfathers of AI" (...)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/samshead/2019/03/27/the-3-godfa...

This is very tenuous but the reason I finger Forbes is because I found the article above linked from this Guardian interview with Hinton, presumably to justify calling Hinton "one of the godfathers of AI":

Known as one of three “godfathers of AI”, (...) Hinton (...)

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/05/geoffrey-...

The Guardian article was one in a series of pieces about Hinton leaving Google and warning of AI doom, that appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, and other outlets, and that called Hinton "the godfather of AI". The first such article I read was this one, again by The Guardian:

The man often touted as the godfather of AI (...)

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/02/geoffrey-...

I, too, was annoyed at the inaccuracy of this moniker and so I went on Twitter to ask Hinton to do something about it. He of course ignored my tweet, but the article with the Forbes link appeared soon after, so maybe Hinton took the hint, after all, or perhaps a Guardian columnist saw my tweet and decided to find some sort of reference for the moniker. Or maybe some other annoyed reader wrote to The Guardian directly and protested. Note the switch from "the godfather of AI" to "one of the three godfathers of AI" - clearly someone tried to do at least a bit of fact-checking, after the first Guardian article. But while it would be edifying if my tweet was at the root of this, I have no way to know it really was; it's just wishful thinking.

Anyway the Forbes article seems to be an early user of the term, if not the originator.

While they are very public figures of DL, I don't think it's fair to call them godfathers of DL anyway. Restricted Boltzman Machines are nothing without Boltzman machines. There were so many people involved at the time as well, it's unfair, especially to their research teams most probably having done the heavy lifting anyway.