[matk]

So, the influx is due to a plethora of things, which are not all mutually exclusive:

1) The Internet has indeed produced large data sets which allowed statistical AI approaches to flourish opposed to logical AI approaches.

2) Somewhat better algorithms. However, I'd say that the algorithmic development hasn't had as much progress as the comments elude. We've only had a few notable innovations like NMT in the past ~20 years.

3) Computational Power to run the algorithms, so we can perform more experiments on large data sets, more computationally intensive algos, and induce better hypotheses.

4) Libraries like scikit-learn and keras have "democratized AI". Grad students used to implement algorithms themselves in the 2000s; now middle-schoolers are doing ML with the tooling already available.

Those are basically it. I think (2) could even be taken off, because again: learning algorithms have barely changed IMO.