[p1esk]

"AI winter" can only happen if something better than "AI" appears. It has nothing to do with hype or investment.

If someone comes up with ways to do speech recognition, image classification, and NLP using traditional (rule based) programming, better than the current state of the art deep learning algorithms, then the DL algorithms are in trouble.

However, this would mean "DL winter" not "AI winter". People are not going to stop using speech recognition and NLP on their phones, or object detection in their cars, just because someone overhyped something or overinvested in some companies. And as long as people use them, the development of better ways to do it will continue.