Deep learning has become very popular in the past few years.  To my understanding, to operate efficiently a lot of data needs to be fed to the deep learning module.  Therefore, bigger companies like Google or Facebook can efficiently use it to enhance some of their operations, e.g., search, image recognition, translation, etc.<p>What I do not understand is why people give deep learning a lot more credit beyond these applications?  Average and small sized companies do not have access to a large amount of data, so deep learning can do very little for them (?).  Not only that, for those companies, deep learning is a way out of understanding the problem they are facing; more than likely, the person that suggests using deep learning cannot explain why the network behaves in a specific way in the case of their problem.<p>I might be mislead in some of these aspects, so please feel free to correct my assumptions and views.  I feel like that my lack of understanding for the AI field in general is causing unnecessary doubts and questions for me.
Ask HN: Why is there so much focus on deep learning and AI?