Well, the original "AI winter" was caused by defense contracts running out without anything to show for it -- turns out, the generals of the time could only be fooled by Eliza clones for so long...

The current AI hype is fueled by public markets, and as they found out during the pandemic, the first one to blink and acknowledge the elephant in the room loses, bigly.

So, even in the face of a devastating demonstration of "AI" ineffectiveness (which I personally haven't seen, despite things being, well, entirely underwhelming), we may very well stuck in this cycle for a while yet...