It's not called "the bitter lesson" for being optimistic. One of the points, I think, is that there is very little a researcher in the 70s could have done to m

It's not called "the bitter lesson" for being optimistic. One of the points, I think, is that there is very little a researcher in the 70s could have done to make progress on these problems, because the computing power just wasn't there yet; and once the computing power was here, almost all of that 70s researcher's work became obsolete.