The thing is that the advent of deep learning was a very big change in the sense you had a general purpose method appear that you could use to throw computing p

The thing is that the advent of deep learning was a very big change in the sense you had a general purpose method appear that you could use to throw computing power at many/most problems (and tune a bit but still) and get results that previously you couldn't get (and when did get results, you required domain experts). No doubt we have changes within the trajectory of this escalating brute force solutions. But relative changes in this paradigm seem fundamentally different than the initial advent of the paradigm.