Why did AI funding dry up for the second time in the late 1980s - right after a billion-dollar boom?
The expert-systems gold rush ended in a spectacular crash, and AI researchers were left out in the cold - again.
The answer
The second AI winter began around 1987 and lasted well into the mid-1990s, triggered by the collapse of the specialized LISP machine market and the failure of expert systems to deliver on their commercial promises. The desktop PC revolution made expensive LISP workstations from companies like Symbolics and Lisp Machines Inc. obsolete overnight - Symbolics alone went from $36 million in annual revenue to bankruptcy. Japan's ambitious Fifth Generation Computer Project, launched in 1982 with $850 million in funding to build intelligent machines using logic programming, was quietly declared a failure by 1992. DARPA shifted its funding to projects with nearer-term payoffs, and the Strategic Computing Initiative ended in 1993 having largely abandoned its original AI goals.
Source: Wikipedia - AI Winter
- ai-winter
- funding
- 1980s
- history
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