It's more they had to wait for processing power to catch up.
One of my bit older friends got an AI doctorate in the 00s, and would always lament a business would never bother reading his thesis, they'd just end up recreating what he did in a few weeks themselves.
It's easy to forget now that in the 90s//00s/10s AI research was mainly viewed as a waste of time. The recurring joke was that general AI was just 20 years away, and had been for the last few decades.
One of my bit older friends got an AI doctorate in the 00s, and would always lament a business would never bother reading his thesis, they'd just end up recreating what he did in a few weeks themselves.
It's easy to forget now that in the 90s//00s/10s AI research was mainly viewed as a waste of time. The recurring joke was that general AI was just 20 years away, and had been for the last few decades.