Artificial intelligence · 1974

First AI winter

After the Lighthill report, funding for AI research dries up in the UK and US.

James Lighthill's 1973 report told the UK government that AI had failed to deliver on its grand promises, citing combinatorial explosion. UK support was cut and DARPA narrowed its funding. The slump lasted until expert systems revived interest around 1980.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 2

Perceptrons (book) 1969
General Problem Solver 1959

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

Training compute of notable AI models Source: Epoch AI, Notable AI Models (CC BY 4.0)

Computation per constant dollar, 1850-2006 Latest: 7.3B million units of computer power per 2006 $ (2003) Source: Nordhaus 2007, Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing, J. Econ. Hist. 67(1), Table 6