The difference with deep neural networks is that they can do so much of their own feature generation. It&#x27;s very different to bayesian networks or SVMs. Because they can create their own features (to a large extent) they can handle unstructured data more simply and more accurately.<p>Neural nets are dramatically improving every month. Recently, the major developments have been around using a wider variety of differentiable functions as layers in the network - see for example Spatial Transformer Networks, and also the more general architectures such as Neural Turing Machines.