AI Winter?

Some of us are afraid to ask, but O'Reilly brings it up and points to evidence.  My team wintered the last one, and it was not pretty.  Its not that we didn't achieve much, we produced millions for the enterprise.  But it just did not prevail despite all the advances we made, both in investments and training human resources.  Hype drove it then, helped and hindered regarding expectations.  That is surely happening again.   But we are too harvesting advances in areas like machine learning that will not go away.

O'Reilly Asks:

Are we heading into another AI winter?
It's happened before, and murmurs of another AI winter coming are increasing: see Filip Piekniewski, Ronald Schmelzer, and Eleanor Cummins. Certainly, the AI hype is starting to get stale, and signs are that several AI technologies are at their peak of inflated expectations and quickly headed for the trough of disillusionment. But this excellent post by Michael Jordan (which we've pointed to in an earlier issue), looks at the question a little differently. Has AI spring arrived yet? ... " 

And they point to an article: 

By:  Michael I. Jordan who is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and the Department of Statistics at UC Berkeley. ... 

Artificial Intelligence — The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the mantra of the current era. The phrase is intoned by technologists, academicians, journalists and venture capitalists alike. As with many phrases that cross over from technical academic fields into general circulation, there is significant misunderstanding accompanying the use of the phrase. But this is not the classical case of the public not understanding the scientists — here the scientists are often as befuddled as the public. The idea that our era is somehow seeing the emergence of an intelligence in silicon that rivals our own entertains all of us — enthralling us and frightening us in equal measure. And, unfortunately, it distracts us.  ... "