TOP Machine Learning Trends of 2020 that will continue in 2021.

Machine Learning and Medicine
Covid-19 switched public attention from futuristic goals to a search for practical solutions to an exponentially growing pandemic. A combination of trending machine learning medical research and world challenging problem seemed to be an ideal way to show how breakthrough technology can save the world. Unfortunately, artificial intelligence failed in its attempt to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
Natural Language Processing
The main event in NLP was a release of a powerful general-purpose language model, GPT-3, that has demonstrated tens of thousands of applications. While GPT-3 was not available to the general public, OpenAI has agreed to license GPT-3 to Microsoft for their own products and services.
Another trending topic in 2020 was transfer learning. Over 500 new papers on transfer learning were released in 2020. Language models became accessible for low resource languages that are languages without relevant datasets. Following the success of the text-to-text transfer transformer which was open-sourced in October 2020, state-of-the-art performance on many cross-lingual NLP tasks was achieved.
Another trend was the development of transformer-based models (e.g. Reformer, Performer, Longformer) with an ultimate goal to make transformers more efficient.
Computer Vision
The main discovery of 2020 in computer vision was the ability of transformer-based models to generate coherent images taking as an input a sequence of pixels. Self-supervised learning demonstrated good results in learning images from large-scale unlabeled data.
Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement learning has always been considered an expensive way of teaching machines. Therefore, in past, this area of machine learning was a privilege of a limited group of academic researchers. In 2020, businesses were trying to explore reinforcement learning due to the scarcity of resources and relevant data. Thus, commercial applications of reinforcement learning technics became a new trend.