Some similarities and differences from DNNs

  1. Both use gradient-descent based learning procedures for minimizing cost functions
  2. Energy based models don't use backpropagation and automatic differentiation for computing gradients, instead turning to Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods.
  3. DNNs often have several hidden layers. A restricted Boltzmann machine has only one hidden layer, however several RBMs can be stacked to make up Deep Belief Networks, of which they constitute the building blocks.

History: The RBM was developed by amongst others Geoffrey Hinton, called by some the "Godfather of Deep Learning", working with the University of Toronto and Google.