The people who built it

AlexNet came from three researchers at the University of Toronto: Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton. Krizhevsky built and trained the network, and his first name became part of its name.

Hinton had also co-authored the 1986 backpropagation paper from Module 4. The AlexNet result joined an older training method to newer hardware, a much larger labelled dataset, and several architectural choices.

The three authors did not invent every ingredient. Their result showed what those ingredients could do when assembled and tested together on ImageNet.