The thing is that progress is so fast in some areas of ML, you dont really know when something could emerge. Who knows, maybe with enough training data and a deep enough network with the right supervision, something extraordinary pops out.

Google google bert nlp. Google recently released an NLP algorithm that basically beats all predecessors, but the algorithm itself is extremely simple. Just lots of data and compute, no telling what will happen in ten years when the amount of data has exploded and GPUs are cheap.