[JSDevOps]

No, AI has nothing to do with this. The late 1990s to early 2010s were a massive period for distributed systems research, but that surge was driven by advancements in computing infrastructure and the growing needs of industry giants—not AI. From theoretical frameworks like Chord to practical implementations like BigTable, Spanner, Cassandra, and TAO, the focus was on solving complex problems in scalability, consistency, and fault tolerance. The efforts to properly implement Paxos were part of that journey. AI had little to do with the sheer volume of breakthroughs that came from this time; it was all about improving distributed systems, not artificial intelligence. Not everything needs to loop back to AI.

[slau]

Maybe there was an edit, but I don’t see how OP said anything was due to AI. They’re just asking whether distributed systems aren’t even more relevant today than during the 90s or 2000s as it seems AI could benefit from being distributed.

[austin-cheney]

There was an edit. The topic reads much differently now.

[civicsquid]

Hm, I’m not sure what you saw in the post before my edits, but I think this answers “did AI motivate / help discover the breakthroughs we saw 20 years ago?” which I definitely agree would be a “no”.

Either way, before and after my edits the intent was to identify areas in which distributed systems researchers moved their focus to support areas such as (but not exclusively) AI.

The question comes from me supposing that “pure” distributed systems research has slowed.