[dragonwriter]

AI winters are a recurring phenomenon, not a myth, and, like the dotcom bust, involve a collapsing hype bubble, reductions in focussed speculative investment in the field, but the technologies that were big during the preceding hype cycle continuing to be important, and develop, though in the case of AI winters often they stop being thought of as AI and just get referred to with a name for the specific technology (often a different one than the main one they were known by in the hype cycle, e.g. “expert systems” from th blast hype cycle are largely “business rules engines” now.)

[tim333]

Googling, there seem to have been two AI winters, the first (late 1970s - early 1980s) when people first figured AI was overhyped, and the second (late 1980s - early 1990s) with the collapse of expert systems. I don't think we are about to get one now - more like AI spring leading to AGI summer.