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.

I would place the beginning of the computer vision hype at 2012 or so when the AlexNet paper came out.

Also an aside, it is mind boggling to me how pre-2021 ML is now ancient history.