If the success of a single company -- indeed, a single product -- is really that pivotal, the industry is already on the brink of collapse.
A winter where AI will continue to be used for semantic search, moderation, translation, captioning, TTS, STT, context-aware grammar checker, LLM, audio/image classifier.
An AI winter where AI will be used everywhere.
It's a difference between big, interesting, investment worthy AI that stands alone and small, uninteresting, practical business features that happen to use AI.
The real bellwether for me will be whether or not Apple, after releasing it's AI features, ever talks about them as a main point in a WWDC again, or if it just gets pushed into "here's something new photos can do (with AI)" like it has for the last x many years.
People always conclude I hate AI. But it’s only a matter of ROI. The amount of capital investment must be matched with increased sales or reduced expenses. If reduced expenses come via job elimination, it doesn’t last long in a consumer society. Increased sales through new product categories are an option, but costs will need to come down and reliability will need to increase.
Hence the current hopes.
I didn't infer anything about your opinion on AI, I just reported that the AI winter will, funny enough, still have AI everywhere, if it's going to happen.
The last AI winter also had AI everywhere, just not AI research everywhere.
What AIs are you referring to? "If ... Else" type of AI?
The statistical model type of AI/machine learning, things like decision trees, decision forests etc. Those has been everywhere for a long time now.
Another winter is inevitable, but how soon will it come?
It's not inevitable
AI is fundamental research, it is inevitable that funding for AI research will dry up at some point in the future just like all such research. AI winter doesn't mean AI isn't used, it refers to AI research funding shrinking back to the same level as other fundamental research fields.