Artificial intelligence · 1987

Second AI winter

The Lisp machine market collapses and expert systems prove brittle and costly to maintain.

Cheap Sun and PC workstations undercut Lisp machines in 1987, and expert systems proved expensive to update and fragile outside narrow domains. DARPA's Strategic Computing Initiative cut AI funding. The word AI became a liability for years.

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

XCON 1980
LISP 1958

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