CNN Architectures — How Networks Got Deeper and Better
Once convolution proved it could crack vision, the race was on to build better CNNs — and the story of how they improved is a compact lesson in deep learning itself. From AlexNet to VGG to ResNet, each landmark architecture solved a specific problem that was blocking progress, and the solutions (depth, small filters, skip connections) became foundational ideas used far beyond vision. This post traces that evolution and the principles it taught.
From AlexNet (which launched deep learning) to VGG (small filters, deep) to ResNet (skip connections that made very deep networks trainable), each landmark solved a specific blocker. ResNet's residual connection generalized everywhere — including every transformer block — so the arc is a compact lesson in deep learning itself.