2016 has been the year of deep learning, some big breakthrough were achieved in 2016 by Google and DeepMind.Some of the most significant achievements are as follow :
AlphaGo triumphs Go showdown : AlphaGo the google’s AI for the game Go to everyone’s surprise was able to beat Go champion Lee Sedol.
Bots kicking our butts in StarCraft : DeepMind AI bots were able to outperform some of the top rated StarCraft II players.
DIY deep learning for Tic Tac Toe : AlphaToe a AI bot was able to outperform most of the people that played with it.
Google’s Multilingual Neural Machine Translation : Google was able to make a model which is capable of translating text b/w languages, reaching a new milestone in linguistics and NLP.
Hence , in a nutshell , 2016 was the year for Deep Learning and a lot of unachievable milestone were conquered during the annual year.
To know more you can read the full article by Precy Kwan at http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/year-in-review-deep-learning-2016