A Brief History of Neural Nets and Deep Learning

Author here - this made front page a long time ago when I first wrote it, so to be clear this is an updated and cleaned up version I got around to making finally. People seemed to quite enjoy this thing, so hope it still holds up! And welcome any feedback.

btw, here's the discussion on HN from the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10910887

I don't think you can claim there was any sort of "AI winter" before the expert systems hype collapsed in the late 80s. Quite the contrary: ARPA (later DARPA) spent prodigiously on various AI labs and companies and in response Japan launched the 5th Generation project. Other countries (e.g. France, with it's Centre Mondial d'Informatique, though AI was only part of it, and its many universities; UK with Oxbridge, Nottingham etc) also invested heavily. In the US, Government-Industry partnerships like MCC spent heavily on the field.

BTW "AI Winter" was a term coined (ironically by Marvin Minsky) at a panel at AAAI-84 (IIRC in Austin). The term echoed "Nuclear Winter", a theory from the late 70s or early 80s. So it's a little weird to apply it to an earlier episode, though as I say that earlier episode didn't exist.

Also, "AI Winter" was specifically addressing the commercial investment in AI technologies; research continued (e.g. DARPA continued to spend).

Thanks for sharing