'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992)

Re:'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992) by mastazi on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @09:01PM (#16634343)

> these days, few people want specialized computers for artificial intelligence, preferring powerful general-purpose machines like those made by Sun Microsystems Inc., a fast-growing Silicon Valley company.

This is a starking example of how tech cycles change over time. The period in which the article was written was during an AI Winter (in fact, the Fifth Generation program is listed as a notable example[1] in the Wikipedia entry for "AI Winter") and Sun Microsystems was still in its prime at the time (work on the yet to be released Java language had started just 12 months[2] before).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter#The_fizzle_of_the_fi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language)#Hi...

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Re:'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992) by gwern on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @10:29PM (#16634812)

Specialized hardware/generalized hardware is one of the classic 'wheels of reincarnation' in computer tech: http://www.cap-lore.com/Hardware/Wheel.html

But looking back over the last 20 years, at least for the silicon paradigm, I think we may finally be in the last turn of the wheel. The trend back towards specialized hardware (for audio, video, encryption, NN, servers vs smartphones) seems fairly inexorable. There's no CPU architecture remotely on the horizon which is general and blows away everything else for flexibility and speed. Even specialized hardware like GPUs are starting to see their lunch eaten by ultra-specialized ASICs and TPUs.

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