I think we are in an interesting time. On par to The Internet, and smartphones.

Up to around 2004 it was all about the "dot coms", basically the web 1.0

Then later came the web 2.0, followed and accelerated by smartphones. Then there was a period of the "internet of things" and "big data".

We are now entering a new era. The era of AI, where all the advances in GPU, training, annotating, and dealing with all this "big data" is finally starting to see real world applications.

Basically the 2017 paper about transformers changed everything in AI.