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AlexNet Source Code

AlexNet Source Code

Image creditAston Zhang, Zachary C. Lipton, Mu Li, Alexander J. Smola (Dive into Deep Learning)
CC BY-SA 4.0 ↗

AlexNet Source Code

Year
2012
Creator
Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, Geoffrey Hinton
Company
University of Toronto; later owned by Google; released by the Computer History Museum
Location
Toronto, Ontario (released from Mountain View, California)

Description

This is the original program for AlexNet, a neural network with 60 million parameters that recognizes objects in photographs. Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto made it in 2012.

Importance

AlexNet won the ImageNet contest in 2012 and showed that deep neural networks trained with the CUDA system of NVIDIA worked. Google bought DNNresearch, the company of the three researchers, in 2013. The Computer History Museum published the code in March 2025 after five years of talks with Google.

Interesting fact

Krizhevsky trained the network on a computer with two NVIDIA graphics cards in his bedroom at the house of his parents.

Acquisition

Google · 2013 · $44,000,000

Sources

  1. CHM Releases AlexNet Source Code ↗Computer History Museum (Hansen Hsu) · 2025-03-20
  2. ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks ↗Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 25 (NIPS 2012) · 2012
  3. The Secret Auction That Set Off the Race for AI Supremacy ↗Wired (Cade Metz) · 2021-03-16
  4. U of T neural networks start-up acquired by Google ↗University of Toronto (Internet Archive copy) · 2013-03-12
  5. Geoff Hinton warns of A.I. 'nightmare scenario' after quitting Google job ↗Fortune (Chloe Taylor) · 2023-05-02