Technically true, but I think this is VASTLY understating what has become possible with your average PC over the past 30 years.
Today I can get quick, effortless renders from Blender with a zillion available assets on the internet on my laptop. I can drop that directly into something like Clip Studio and paint right over it.
In the 80s you needed an extraordinarily expensive workstation like the Quantel Paintbox to even do primitive Photoshop type stuff. If you wanted a 3D render you needed a whole farm of servers.
That seems like an overreach. Thirty years ago, object recognition basically didn’t work, except in extremely simple cases. Something like semantic segmentation would have been way out of reach. Computers couldn’t play Go effectively against even modestly skilled human amateurs.
I meant the very technical sense where you could take an object recognition algorithm and compile it to run on a 80386 and it would run fine although slow to the point of not being practical. Computers brought us more speed (and memory) to enable new classes of uses, but there’s not a single intrinsic operation a modern computer does which an old one can’t replicate.
