CentralNotice AI winter From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation , search In the history of artificial intelligence , an AI winter is a period of reduced funding and interest in artificial intelligence research. [ 1 ] The term was coined by analogy to the idea of a nuclear winter . The field has experienced several cycles of hype , followed by disappointment and criticism, followed by funding cuts, followed by renewed interest years or decades later. There were two major winters in 1974–80 and 1987–93 [ 2 ] and several smaller episodes, including: 1966: the failure of machine translation , 1970: the abandonment of connectionism , 1971–75: DARPA 's frustration with the Speech Understanding Research program at Carnegie Mellon University , 1973: the large decrease in AI research in the United Kingdom in response to the Lighthill report , 1973–74: DARPA 's cu...