AI has been a huge bubble ~5 times now at least. Oh, and we prefer the term "AI winter", thank you.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter</a><p>Failure of AI translation in the 60's, abandonment of connectionism (~95% of deep learning) in the early 70s, government deciding AI is useless (mid-seventies), LISP collapse (mid-eighties), expert systems abandonment, AGAIN failure of deep learning (after seeing CNNs massively improve recognition) in the mid-2000s.<p>And let's just not talk about how often specific subfields of AI have been in winter. One subfield that is particularly famous (and I did my thesis on, because ... I'm an idiot) is biologically plausible machine learning, or attempting to get closer to biological machine learning or "liquid" machine learning. People have been restarting this field since before my father was born ... and it keeps dying, again and again and again. And hey, I gave it a shot too in my thesis, and I failed just like everyone else (technically I succeeded, in that I managed to get the network working ~3 times, but it certainly did not "wake up" the field).<p>I guess it's just that people look at biology, and look at combinatorics/statistics ... and feel biology is the easier path forward, both because you don't have to find your own ideas, and it's generally easier (e.g. transformers are 2 big ideas. One, as it turns out, is more or less equivalent to "brainwaves", ie. positional encoding, something nature has used for at least 500000 years. That's not how it was found though. Transformers refuse to train without some serious expected value shenanigans)<p>Meanwhile I'm convinced most of the progress of AI actually happens during the winters. At this point a lot researchers are let go, and make a lot of progress in the private sector that then spreads across everything. AI, and specifically the more-or-less abandoned CNN networks are the algorithm behind most traffic control systems.<p>Right now particular kinds of generative AI are definitely making their way into the economy, as is a whole bunch of autonomous robots. That is actually quite incredible. That will expand, by a lot, winter or not.