I feel like cloud technology may be a contributing factor as well. At the same time, once Geoffrey Hinton used a deep neural network and participated in the Im

I feel like cloud technology may be a contributing factor as well. At the same time, once Geoffrey Hinton used a deep neural network and participated in the ImageNet contest (2012: http://www.image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2012/results.html http://www.image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2012/results.html), his results beat the next best thing by a full 10%. The results were so astounding that many people immediately began re-visiting neural networks. Shortly afterwards, people proved it could beat the current technology for language processing and more. Now a days, it seems like a major leap has been in real-time translation with Skype and now Google launching machine translation applications/functions. Side note, in my opinion, start-ups that are looking to compete with large giants like Google will have a pretty hard time. In the end, implementing deep neural nets that work is still extremely hard. The companies that do it right usually get bought up by one of the giants. Google has some of the leading researchers in academia on its side as well.