The time span on which these developments take place matter a lot for whether the bitter lesson is relevant to a particular AI deployment. The best AI models of the future will not have 100K lines of hand-coded edge cases, and developing those to make the models of today better won't be a long-term way to move towards better AI.

On the other hand, most companies don't have unlimited time to wait for improvements on the core AI side of things, and even so building competitive advantages like a large existing customer base or really good private data sets to train next-gen AI tools have huge long-term benefits.

There's been an extraordinary amount of labor hours put into developing games that could run, through whatever tricks were necessary, on whatever hardware actually existed for consumers at the time the developers were working. Many of those tricks are no longer necessary, and clearly the way to high-definition real-time graphics was not in stacking 20 years of tricks onto 2000-era hardware. I don't think anyone working on that stuff actually thought that was going to happen, though. Many of the companies dominating the gaming industry now are the ones that built up brands and customers and experience in all of the other aspects of the industry, making sure that when better underlying scaling came there they had the experience, revenue, and know-how to make use of that tooling more effectively.