#AI Winter

The dream of machine intelligence collided with reality in the early 1970s. Government funding collapsed. Research groups dissolved. Careers were redirected. This is the full narrative of AI's first great crisis — told from the inside, through the experiences of the people who built the dream and watched it crash — and the deeper questions about ambition, honesty, and institutional courage that the crisis forced.

The full narrative of AI's second great contraction — told from the inside, through the experiences of the researchers who built the boom and watched it collapse. The collapse of the expert systems industry, the dissolution of the LISP machine market, the reduction of DARPA funding, and the underground movement that kept the neural network approach alive through the cold.

What the first AI winter actually felt like for the people who lived through it. The funding cuts, the disbanded research groups, the researchers who left the field, and the stubborn few who kept working in the cold. The story of how AI's first collapse shaped everything that came after.

The expert systems boom collapsed almost as quickly as it had risen. The LISP machine market imploded overnight. DARPA cut funding. And for the second time in AI's history, the field contracted, researchers left, and the most pessimistic observers began to wonder whether the project was fundamentally misguided. The full story of AI's second near-death experience — and the underground movement that kept the neural network flame alive through the cold.

In 1973 a distinguished mathematician named James Lighthill wrote a review of AI research that was so devastating it caused governments across the world to pull their funding and sent the entire field into its first winter. How one document changed the course of AI history — and whether it was right.