Funding in the 1980s was sometimes very good. My company bought me an expensive Lisp Machine in 1982 and after that, even in “AI winters” it mostly seemed that money was available.
AI has a certain mystique that helps get money. In the 1980s I was on a DARPA neural network tools advisory panel, and I concurrently wrote a commercial product that included the 12 most common network architectures. That allowed me to step in when a project was failing (a bomb detector we developed for the FAA) that used a linear model, with mediocre results. It was a one day internal consult to provide software for a simple one hidden layer backprop model. During that time I was getting mediocre results using symbolic AI for NLP, but the one success provided runway internally in my company to keep going.
You are right about funding levels, even taking inflation into account. Some of the infrastructure, like Connection Machines and Butterfly Machines seemed really expensive at the time though.
They only seem expensive because they're not expected to generate a lot of value (or military/strategic benefit).
Compare that the 6+ trillions that were spent in the US alone on nuclear weapons, and then consider, what is of greater strategic importance: ASI or nukes?
AI has a certain mystique that helps get money. In the 1980s I was on a DARPA neural network tools advisory panel, and I concurrently wrote a commercial product that included the 12 most common network architectures. That allowed me to step in when a project was failing (a bomb detector we developed for the FAA) that used a linear model, with mediocre results. It was a one day internal consult to provide software for a simple one hidden layer backprop model. During that time I was getting mediocre results using symbolic AI for NLP, but the one success provided runway internally in my company to keep going.