CHM Makes AlexNet Source Code Available to the Public

Mountain View, California, March 20, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — In partnership with Google, the Computer History Museum (CHM), the leading museum exploring the history of computing and its impact on the human experience, today announced the public release and long-term preservation of the source code for AlexNet, the neural network that kickstarted today’s prevailing approach to AI.

“Google is delighted to contribute the source code for the groundbreaking AlexNet work to the Computer History Museum,” said Jeff Dean, chief scientist, Google DeepMind and Google Research. “This code underlies the landmark paper ‘ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks,’ by Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton, which revolutionized the field of computer vision and is one of the most cited papers of all time.”

For more information about the release of this historic source code, visit CHM’s blog post here.

By the late 2000s, Hinton’s graduate students at the University of Toronto were beginning to use graphics processing units (GPUs) to train neural networks for image recognition tasks, and their success suggested that deep learning could be a solution to general-purpose AI. Sutskever, one of the students, believed that the performance of neural networks would scale with the amount of data available, and the arrival of ImageNet provided the opportunity. Completed in 2009, ImageNet was a dataset of images developed by Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li that was larger than any previous image dataset by several orders of magnitude.

In 2011, Sutskever persuaded Krizhevsky, a fellow graduate student, to train a neural network for ImageNet. With Hinton serving as faculty advisor, Krizhevsky did so on a computer with two NVIDIA cards. Over the course of the next year, he continuously refined and retrained the network until it achieved performance superior to its competitors. The network would ultimately be named AlexNet, after Krizhevsky. In describing the AlexNet project, Hinton told CHM, “Ilya thought we should do it, Alex made it work, and I got the Nobel Prize.”

Before AlexNet, very few machine learning researchers used neural networks. After it, almost all of them would. Google eventually acquired the company started by Hinton, Krizhevsky and Sutskever, and a Google team led by David Bieber worked with CHM for five years to secure its release to the public.

About CHM Software Source Code
The Computer History Museum has the world’s most diverse archive of software and related material. The stories of software’s origins and impact on the world provide inspiration and lessons for the future to global audiences—including young coders and entrepreneurs. The Museum has released other historic source code such as APPLE II DOS, IBM APL, Apple MacPaint and QuickDraw, Apple Lisa, and Adobe Photoshop. Visit our website to learn more.

About CHM 
The Computer History Museum’s mission is to decode technology—the computing past, digital present, and future impact on humanity. From the heart of Silicon Valley, we share insights gleaned from our research, our events, and our incomparable collection of computing artifacts and oral histories to convene, inform, and empower people to shape a better future.

CONTACT: Carina Sweet
Computer History Museum 
(650) 810-1059
csweet@computerhistory.org