There have been a number of breakthroughs in specific fields recently. In fact it seems like there is a paper every week that pushes the state of the art forwar

There have been a number of breakthroughs in specific fields recently. In fact it seems like there is a paper every week that pushes the state of the art forward in some branch of AI/ML. I think the big one that triggered the current excitement was the success of convolutional networks in image recognition tasks. You can read about that one (in 2012) here: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/530561/the-revolutionary-technique-that-quietly-changed-machine-vision-forever/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/530561/the-revolutionary-... EDIT: This paper refers to the algorithm as SuperVision which was the team name, but it is more commonly called AlexNet. Here is another article discussing it: https://qz.com/1034972/the-data-that-changed-the-direction-of-ai-research-and-possibly-the-world/ https://qz.com/1034972/the-data-that-changed-the-direction-o...