I can't think of too many recent ML breakthroughs that haven't largely come on the back of access to enormous data sets.
Interestingly, curious if that's why Tesla equipped cars with sensors before enabling autopilot as a user option. Hypothetically, can't see why they couldn't have downloaded the autopilot code to cars and been running it in ghost mode while users drove, generating faults whenever errors were encountered and sending the relevant sensor data back home.