> in the 80s, when Japan was pursuing the "Fifth-Generation Computers"

“The Fifth Generation Computer Systems…was a 10-year initiative launched in 1982 by Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) to develop computers based on massively parallel computing and logic programming” [1].

That sounds an awful lot like GPUs and HBM.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...

Except this time it works.

A lot of what's happening now is the (very) belated delivery of what everyone was talking about when they talked about "expert systems."