Tech & AI
AI winters: the booms and busts before this one
12 min
Artificial intelligence has surged and collapsed several times since the 1950s, each hype cycle followed by a funding drought. Explore the history of AI winters and the case for and against 'this time is different.'
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Show notes
The first AI winter began when the Lighthill Report identified the hurdle of combinatorial explosion.
The Mansfield Amendment restricted DARPA funding to military applications, causing a massive research slowdown.
XCON saved Digital Equipment Corporation forty million dollars annually using early if-then rule systems.
The LISP machine market collapsed because general-purpose workstations from Sun Microsystems made specialized hardware obsolete.
AlexNet revived deep learning by proving statistical pattern recognition could outperform human-written symbolic logic.
Modern AI relies on three pillars: massive datasets, graphics processing units, and the transformer architecture.
In this episode
- 1Intro1 min
- 2The Golden Era and the First Frost2 min
- 3The Expert Systems Boom and the LISP Crash3 min
- 4The Quiet Spring: Deep Learning's Slow Ascent3 min
- 5Is This Time Different? The Case for Permanence2 min
- 6Outro1 min
Sources
- Is an 'AI winter' coming? Here's what investors and executives can learn ...
- Implications for AI Research: Applying Lessons from the Expert Systems Boom and Bust to the Current Large-Language Model Boom | Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
- AI winter
- AI Winter: Understanding the Cycles of AI Development - DataCamp
- How the AI Boom Went Bust – Communications of the ACM
- AI Winters Explained: 5 Crashes That Shaped Modern AI
- The AI Innovation Cycle Started in 1956. Here's Why We Keep Forgetting That. | RootByte
- AI Winter: What It Was and Why It Happened | Teachfloor
- Is Another AI Winter Coming? - T&I News
- AI Winter: History of AI Collapse and Why It May Happen Again
- A PROPOSAL FOR THE DARTMOUTH SUMMER RESEARCH ...
- https://rodsmith.nz/wp-content/uploads/Lighthill_1973_Report.pdf
- https://web.cs.swarthmore.edu/~meeden/cs63/f11/AIproposal.pdf
- Dartmouth workshop
- Part I Arti cial Intelligence
- Lighthill report
- Ray Solomonoff and the Dartmouth Summer Research Project in Artificial Intelligence, 1956
- Fifth Generation Computer Systems
- History of artificial intelligence
- Implications for AI Research: Applying Lessons from the Expert Systems Boom and Bust to the Current Large-Language Model Boom
- The AI That Saved $25 Million a Year and Couldn't Save the Company That Built It - Application Development Cloud
- AI Watch
- Between the Booms: AI in Winter
- Annotated history of modern AI and deep neural networks
- AI Engineer - AI History
- The third AI summer: AAAI Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture
- The First Winter – James Howard
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