---
id: "2012-09-30-alexnet"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2012-09-30-alexnet/"
as_of: "2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00"
date: "2012-09-30"
date_precision: day
category: research
importance: 5
confidence: high
status: [Confirmed]
sources: 2
editor: human editor
human_review: null
version: "2026-10-04"
---

As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2012-09-30-alexnet/

# AlexNet wins ImageNet challenge, igniting the deep learning boom

Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton's GPU-trained convolutional network won ILSVRC-2012 with a top-5 error of 15.3% vs. 26.2% for the runner-up, convincing the field that deep learning works.

## Key facts
- ILSVRC-2012 top-5 test error: 15.3% (runner-up: 26.2%)
- ~60 million parameters, 5 conv + 3 fully connected layers
- Trained on two NVIDIA GTX 580 GPUs
- Used ReLU activations and dropout
- Paper presented at NeurIPS (NIPS) 2012

## What happened

AlexNet crushed the ImageNet classification challenge; the team's startup DNNresearch was acquired by Google in 2013.

## Why it matters

The single event most often cited as the start of the modern AI era: it established GPUs + big data + deep nets as the winning recipe and made NVIDIA central to AI.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): in its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): in its training data
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen (training cutoff March 2026): in its training data
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): in its training data

## Sources

1. [ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (NeurIPS 2012)](https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2012/hash/c399862d3b9d6b76c8436e924a68c45b-Abstract.html) (papers.nips.cc, paper)
2. [Wikipedia: AlexNet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlexNet) (en.wikipedia.org, discussion)

## Changes

- 2026-09-29 (filed): Created

## Related

- 2009-06-20: [ImageNet dataset presented at CVPR 2009](https://postcutoff.com/e/2009-06-20-imagenet/index.md)
- 1989-12-01: [LeCun applies backprop-trained convolutional nets to handwritten digits](https://postcutoff.com/e/1989-12-01-lecun-convolutional-networks/index.md)
- People: [Geoffrey Hinton](https://postcutoff.com/person/geoffrey-hinton/), [Ilya Sutskever](https://postcutoff.com/person/ilya-sutskever/)