On the topic of "still quite impressive what can be done", I can't more emphatically recommend (the now quite old!) lecture that Peter Norvig gave which is available on YouTube called the unreasonable effectiveness of data. He does a great job showing some toy and small examples about just how nuanced this point is, and that it is easy to underestimate the impact that simply more data can have. We tend to think of it as a quantitative impact and make all sorts of assumptions as to the second derivative of what the gains can be, but he does a great job showing that there might be all sorts of interesting inflection points and that simply more data can actually have significant qualitative differences.