It's funny because in the lecture itself he discussed how the idea of neural networks was once on the chopping board of the course, but they decided to keep it in just to avoid people reinventing the wheel.
It's amazing how a lot of the basics were written about in textbooks from the 80's and even earlier, but how some recent works by people such as George Hinton have reinvigorated the field and actually enabled practical applications.
I think Hinton himself was there in the 80s pioneering neural networks, and he stuck with it this whole time. He was one of the first researchers to demonstrate the use of backpropagation to train neural networks.
It's amazing how a lot of the basics were written about in textbooks from the 80's and even earlier, but how some recent works by people such as George Hinton have reinvigorated the field and actually enabled practical applications.