Aí winters happened because of the hype and that people ultimately realize AGI (not even talking about the Singularity) is not as easily achievable as hyped. So interest dies.
Yeah, I'm not really sure where we're standing at the moment but I feel like there's a slight over-hyping going on. Frankly I wouldn't be too surprised if even something like self-driving cars was not as close as some people make it to be. I think many people think "hey, we're 90% there, just one last push and we're good" except the last 10% has a very, very long tail and it might take us a long while to figure out completely. The idea that we might have completely autonomous general-purpose self driving cars in within a decade seems very optimistic to me.
That being said I'm very far removed from A.I. research so I don't really know what I'm talking about.
That being said I'm very far removed from A.I. research so I don't really know what I'm talking about.