Machine learning in the cloud
One of the most important factors that contributed to the huge successes of machine learning in the last 10 years was the increased computing power. In 2010, Dan Cireșan et al. have set the new state of art for handwritten digits using an algorithm developed in the 1980s and by augmenting the data set with a procedure described in 1990. The only difference was the amount of computing power: using a modern GPU they finished training in one day, which might have taken 50 days on a CPU.