The First AI Winter

In 1973, the British government's Lighthill Report delivered a devastating critique of AI research, concluding that the field had failed to deliver on its grand promises. Combined with DARPA's growing frustration over stalled progress in machine translation and speech recognition, funding for AI research was slashed across the US and UK. The period from roughly 1974 to 1980, known as the first "AI winter," saw grants dry up, labs close, and the term "artificial intelligence" become almost taboo in funding proposals. The optimism of Dartmouth had collided with the reality that problems like common-sense reasoning and natural language understanding were far harder than anyone imagined. The field would recover, but the pattern of hype and disillusionment would repeat.