Oh man this was huge. You have to remember, machine learning was nothing back then. It was on nobody's radar.

Then comes this flashy $1 million prize. Tons of universities had teams. So it really helped their recruitment.

It also likely contributed to the idea of creating Kaggle which has itself greatly contributed to data-science education by giving everyone an open forum in which to compete.

Then there were other signficant projects around this time like ImageNet which became a competition too. That open dataset led to tons of research and applications.