So... why did AI take off now?

To most folks, it probably seems like one day AI was just suddenly everywhere. But why now? What were the technical breakthroughs that brought us to our current state of affairs? And, yes, I know "AI" is not the best semantic description but it is the most understood

Citations:

Xiangbo Shu, Jinhui Tang, Guo-Jun Qi, Wei Liu, and Jian Yang. 2019.Hierarchical long short-term concurrent memory for human interaction recognition.IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 43, 3 (2019), 1110–1118. https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.00270

Vaswani, Ashish; Shazeer, Noam; Parmar, Niki; Uszkoreit, Jakob; Jones, Llion; Gomez, Aidan N; Kaiser, Łukasz; Polosukhin, Illia (2017). "Attention is All you Need" . Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. 30. https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

J. Wei, X. Wang, D. Schuurmans, M. Bosma, brian ichter, F. Xia, E. H. Chi, Q. V. Le, and D. Zhou. Chain of thought prompting elicits reasoning in large language models. In A. H. Oh, A. Agarwal, D. Belgrave, and K. Cho, editors, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2022. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.11903

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=...

https://thespoon.tech/pizza-chain-dod...

https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/27/2...

https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5ym4...

0:00 Intro
0:22 Ye Olde Days - The Early '00s
0:35 Deep Learning
1:37 Transformers
2:25 Fancy Hardware
2:45 Training Data
2:48 Miscellaneous Fun Facts