We've hit a couple of inflection point.

The numbers of researchers and research labs scaled up that there is now many well funded teams with experience.

Public tooling and collaboration has reached a point where research happen across the open internet between researchers at a pace that wasn't before possible. Common Crawl, stable diffusion, hugging-face, etc...)

All the techniques that took years in small labs to prove as viable are now getting scaled up across data and people in front of our eyes.