AI Winter

An AI winter is a period of reduced funding and interest in artificial intelligence research. The term was coined by analogy to the idea of a nuclear winter and first appeared in 1984, as the topic of a public debate at the annual meeting of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence. There, Roger Schank and Marvin Minsky, two researchers who had lived through the downturn of the 1970s, warned the business community that enthusiasm for AI had spiraled out of control and that disappointment would follow. Three years later, the AI industry began to collapse. Historians describe two…