I see the 2010s as a decade of maturing the technologies of the late 2000s.

Suddenly humanity had this massive influx of online users, and with them mountains of data, everyone was now taking pictures, filming, streaming, ... and sharing it online through social media.

Data sets exploded, so much so that a new branch of data management was called into life: Big Data. When I was in uni around 2010 that was one of the hottest topics. Because all these companies now had stupendous amounts of data but were unsure how to process it or even what to do with it.

On the commercial side there was hope it could be used to better target ads, to better predict what customers want.

Talks (more like whispers) were starting to float that maybe, just maybe, these grand new datasets could help us get better AI systems. Perhaps some day have systems that were better than humans at things like image recognition.

What I mean to say, in short, is this: The 2010s taught us how to process lots of data. And we're now starting to see that bear fruit.