Comment by Tossrock

I don't think there will be any more AI winters. Previous AI winters were largely the result of a crash in federal grant writing (DARPA/the Strategic Computing Initiative) to labs at research universities, which depend on them for cash.

This time, the ongoing AI/ML renaissance is funded by private industry, and the value they are extracting from it far outstrips the costs of keeping their in-house R&D labs operating. Even if there's a contraction in the market, I can't envision any possible world where Google/Facebook/etc stop working on AI, and they have the money to keep it up as long as they want.