Paul Werbos

"The problem people have out there to try to understand what's going on in the world today, there are just a whole lot of pieces, and you don't really know what's happening until you can put them together and know what they are"

"And it's really scary to be one of the few people in the world, even now who really knows what these algorithms are. I see people talking about artificial intelligence and neural nets and their future, and it's amazing what kind of theories you can hear on TV, a lot of it from people who have political motivations."

"So backpropagation really came from me trying to understand how brains work and how you could build a brain like a brain. And when I was growing up, I read a lot of books I was excited by. There's a book called Computers and Thought, which was the start of the whole artificial intelligence world."

"That's exactly the key thing. We need to understand the math to get it right. And so I spent a lot of time reading John von Neumann, and von Neumann had a lot of really good thoughts about how to do it. And I was amazed people didn't follow up on some of these thoughts. So I decided, well, okay, I'll take the mathematical approach. I'll solve these mathematical problems. Here's how to do it."

"And believe it or not, reinforcement learning was the first thing, how to come up with a system that could learn to act and achieve goals."