Funding is behind the curve. Social networks existed in 2003 and Facebook became a billion dollar company a decade later. AI horror fantasies from the 90’s still haven’t come true. There is no god, there is no Skynet.
AlphaGo beating the top human player was in 2016. To my memory, that was one of the first public breakthroughs of the new era of machine learning.
Around 2010 when I was at university, a friend did their undergraduate thesis on neural networks. Among our cohort it was seen as a weird choice and a bit of a dead-end from the last AI winter.