Excerpt from our upcoming course: The Foundations of Artificial Intelligence: - - - - - This brittleness contributed to what is known as the first “AI winter”. Very early on, the field had made bold promises: about a bright shiny future that was just around the corner. But by the mid 1970s those promises had largely failed to materialize, and many of the systems of the day couldn’t scale beyond carefully controlled demonstrations. On a practical level: they simply required more compute than was available at the time, more hand-coded knowledge than researchers could practically supply, more robustness than the underlying design was capable of, and more funding than was available for these types of projects at the time. The 80s brought on another period of optimism, as expert systems started to see commercial success in a few domains. But it turns out that the designs of the day were simply too expensive to build, too difficult to update, too narrow in scope, and too vulnerable to failure when conditions changed. So by the end of the decade another 2nd “AI Winter” had begun. - - - - - Full course coming soon: JournalClub.io
