Yes, he's probably aware, but hopefully we're not coming to one. Machine learning was a lot less useful in the 1980s. There's still a lot of amazing (and unfortunate) uses for machine learning for government and business left to be plucked.
The only thing that is going to die for now is any trace of the idea from non-technicals is that if we throw $10mm at it, it's going to come alive.
Big hype cycles typically have lower low point as well as higher high points. I don't know if another AI winter is around the corner, I hope not, but it is definitely a possibility. I am much more pessimistic about blockchains.
There won't be because it still actually is useful governments and businesses. They can tangibly use it to increase their functioning/profits - that was not the case during the AI winter. Computers sucked, data sucked, and there was no internet. I hope you're right in that the attention it is getting decreases. A reasonable limit of what we can actually do with what we currently have is probably within the next 15 years. Having 50 deep learning moocs that teach introductory matrix multiplication isn't really benefitting much either. Hopefully things come to a better equilibrium soon.
I'm very pessimistic about blockchains but I'm not sure if they're going away or not, either. Regardless of regulation, there's a lot of people screaming about blockchains and that doesn't seem to be changing: “I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.”
> There won't be because it still actually is useful governments and businesses.
This was actually true before, AI has been useful, it has always gotten more useful over time, AI has always had limits, and AI winters occurred because expectations dramatically exceeded those limits. For there to be a winter/crash, hype just has to increase to a point that is way beyond what we can hope to accomplish in the near time. It doesn't help that the Chinese are taking the place of the Japanese, who in turn were a significant cause for the last AI winter.
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