Easy to forget but there was a ton of industry+investor excitement around computer vision from ~2015-2021, to the extent that the "MLops" niche sprung up around it. This was called AI at the time, and mostly went out the window when general-pupose pretrained models arrived.

And now it's private companies wasting investor money. Not sure there's much difference between the two.

This is ignoring ML which has existed for decades.

Neural networks, computer vision, sentiment analysis, all of these and more have provided an unspeakable amount of value over the years.