Apple hires CMU professor as director of AI research to smarten up Siri
Just mull the power and influence of deep learning: Yann LeCun is in FB, Geoffrey Hinton and part of his lab are affiliated with Google, Ruslan Salakhutdinov is now with Apple. In addition to this, there are other alumni of LeCun, Hinton, and Bengio dispersed across different notable companies like OpenAI, etc. Aside from the post-WW2 semiconductors-spurt, I can't think of a 'technology' that has become so suddenly so important as deep learning. You have a few scientists who spawned the fields of neural networks and deep learning in charge of what appear to be significant research efforts at the top tech companies (by market cap). Like silicon semiconductors and integrated circuits, deep learning approaches are likely to be the primary set of algorithms underlying many future 'intelligent' products and services. You will likely see a similar thing in biology/biotechnology with CRISPR in the near future.