Very interesting thing(maybe sample representativeness) is that there aren't any "fast" things from the 2010-2020 decade. Does anyone have anything impressive in mind? Personally can't think of anything myself.
The entire ride-sharing/delivery/logistics space was moving ridiculously fast during that time.
Remember those photos of thousands of multicolored bicycles abandoned in fields? Or the scooters being yeeted into the ocean, global riots from taxi drivers, the collapse of the taxi medallion market, regulatory debates in every city/state/country, billions of VC money raised in weeks (or days), the Darwinian M&A scene as companies were devoured in the jungle as quickly as they were founded...
...and, of course, the fact that you could finally push a button and make a bag of groceries appear. (Though the 3,600,000 millisecond latency still isn't great on that one.)
Even though this in the long run may have burned more money than it yielded, I think this also represented a pretty landmark shift in how people saw computers (including smartphones). They were no longer just devices for surfing the web or messaging. Between this, and the rise of Amazon/online shopping, computers were now ways to actuate the world
IIRC, a lot of that was enabled (at least in the US) by the wider-scale rollout of 3g and smartphones. Before that, not only did few people have smartphones (uber initially had both a website and phone number you could contact to get a ride for at least a few years), but even metropolitan service areas were too spotty for near-realtime apps to work effectively.
COVID19 vaccine was 2021, wasn't it? Just slightly outside the decade.
A lot of war-equipment got spun up in 2022 and 2023 extremely quickly, but I don't think people are talking about that.
-----------
EDIT: The 2010s through 2020s were a period of incredibly low interest rates and cheap money. Most projects were thinking long-term, for good reason. When interest rates are 0% and you got free money / free borrowing, there's not much point in doing anything quickly.
We've got stupendously stupid ideas like MoviePass getting deployed, and bankrupted, within months. Does that count? Presumably we want something that wasn't "just" fast, but also impressive / accomplished something real.
The vaccine development happened effectively in a weekend. The long period of time to develop isn't related to science, it's the bureaucracy afterwards that took so long. So depends on the definition.
Isn’t that partly the point of the linked page? That one of the things contributing to how slow things go these days is that bureaucracy can grind quick developments to a halt?
Depending on where you draw the lines, maybe Oculus. I think from the formation of the company to shipping dev kits was less than a year, but there was obviously research and prototypes that happened prior to that, and it was a while before they were shipping consumer devices.
Redis barely misses the decade cut I think, with an early 2009 start to a production launch and rapid adoption starting around mid-2009.
About 30% of interstate gas pipelines were built between 2007-2017 as one of the many consequences of the shale boom. Global LNG trade doubled in the same window.
Germany installed 6 (floating) LNG import terminals in 2022.
California built five gas-fired power plants in a few months in 2021, after a blackout.
We can still build things fast when there is institutional will to do so.
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.
