Why now? What enabled this technology revolution?

- I said we were living in a golden age … for artificial intelligence and machine learning. … After decades of attempting to make progress in AI, … we're finally doing it, why now? … To answer this, let's talk about … why the old approach to AI didn't work. … Starting about 60 years ago, … computer scientists approached AI … the same way they approached other problems, … by building models inside the computer. … Want to make a computer vision system recognize blocks? … Build a model of what a block … looks like from different perspectives. … Want to understand English, or translate it to Russian? … Build a model of the English language's syntax, … grammar and words. … The most extreme example of a model based AI … was a program called Cyc, C-Y-C. … A team spent over a thousand engineer years … teaching Cyc over 24 million rules and assertions. … It never really accomplished anything, … and that's the common theme of model based AI. … While we got some results in computer vision, … machine translation and other applications, …