Just like today's AI algorithms were known in the 1960's. But they were not. To take recurrent networks as an example, active work on RNNs only started in the

Just like today's AI algorithms were known in the 1960's. But they were not. To take recurrent networks as an example, active work on RNNs only started in the 80ies. LSTMs, which are one of the solutions to the vanishing gradient problem were only discovered in 1997 by Sepp Hochreiter. Of course, computational power is one of the limiting factors, but saying that it is the only thing that held AI back is disingenuous and dismisses the hard work of a couple of generations in AI research. Edit: and Schmidhuber