I think it only took a couple of years from 2014-16, and it was marked as being decades away by many experts at the time.
I also remember lots of ridicule about Instagram only being a year or so old, when it was acquired, and possibly some of the Space X rocket development programs count as ‘fast’ although I don’t know all the details.
The examples in Fast aren't breakthroughs, they're just big engineering projects. AlphaGo's design is quite simple, the estimate of decades was prior to the discovery of the unexpected power of deep neural networks.
I think it only took a couple of years from 2014-16, and it was marked as being decades away by many experts at the time.
I also remember lots of ridicule about Instagram only being a year or so old, when it was acquired, and possibly some of the Space X rocket development programs count as ‘fast’ although I don’t know all the details.