As summer fades into fall, many in the tech world are worried about winter. Late last month, a Bloomberg columnist asked “is the AI winter finally upon us?” British newspaper The Telegraph was more definitive. “The next AI winter is coming,” it declared. Meanwhile, social media platform X was filled with chatter about a possible AI winter.

An “AI winter” is what folks in artificial intelligence call a period in which enthusiasm for the idea of machines that can learn and think like people wanes—and investment for AI products, companies, and research dries up. There’s a reason this phrase comes so naturally to the lips of AI pundits: We’ve already lived through several AI winters over the 70-year history of artificial intelligence as a research field. If we’re about to enter another one,

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