This is John Batchel, conversation with Gary Rivlin, his new book, AI Valley. This is a story of what's

happening right now in artificial intelligence, but it's also the foundational story. AI comes out of

the 20th century, and the start and stop of it, the concept of it, is critical.

Gary here explains quickly what was an AI winter once upon a time when it happened first

in the 20th century and then again in the 21st century, AI winter, like nuclear winter.

Here's Gary Rivlin, the book AI Valley, Microsoft Google, and the trillion-dollar race

to cash in on artificial intelligence, much more of this in the coming weeks.

Yeah, the AI winter.

There's been two AI winters.

Again, it was kind of born in this optimism.

So, you know, in this 60s and 70s, it wasn't just the U.S. military or the U.S.

Post Office. There were a lot of corporations that saw a lot of potential here. I mean, giants like

IBM, et cetera. And, you know, so there was all this hope and there was all this research

dollars, you know, federal dollars, corporate dollars that went into AI. But it really

wasn't getting anywhere. And so there was an AI winter in the 1970s where the funding dried up.

And, you know, as you said before, AI, artificial intelligence became a dirty word. Like if you

want to raise money for a grant, you would not use

the term AI. And the same thing would happen a second time. There was this real flurry of activity

in the 1980s, this idea of expert systems. Like, hey, we could use, you're on an oil rig,

you know, deep in the ocean.

You could use an expert system to monitor for safety.

And so there was this kind of hype, I would say overhype of like, hey, these expert systems

...