It was lost interest from investors and government.
All that money poured into AI research produced little rewards. There were expert systems that worked well and they became profitable businesses, but othervice there was little to show. In retrospect I think it was good idea to adjust the money to match the results and wait until computer scientist come up with new ideas.
Current Ai boom is result from 'Canadian mafia' diligently working and actually producing results and faster computing, especially GPCPU.
Unless we get constant stream of new ideas that build up on the current ones, there should reduced interest and investments once most benefits have been materialized.
One could similarly say about our time: "there were neural network applications that worked well, but otherwise there was little to show". What is the fundamental difference between what is going on now and what was happening before the previous AI winter?
I feel that people constantly misrepresent how impressive expert systems seemed back in their heyday. They had a lot of practical applications and they could do some very cool tricks.
Interestingly, the highly impressive accomplishments of SVMs, random forests and boosting went mostly unnoticed, precisely because of the AI Winter.
Congress might be full of idiots or smart people trying to make you believe they're idiots, but don't for a moment think the federal government as a whole is technologically stunted.
And governments will always want to avoid risks, especially risks that knock them out of their monopolies on force and economic power.
Moreover, controlling AI research is ever harder than nuclear research. Creating a technological disadvantage compared to rogue states without such regulations does not seem like a good idea.
Gambler: "I already got five 6's. I can't possibly get another one. That's a statistical improbability!"
Wrong assumption: Past dice rolls affect future rolls where as dice rolls are independent. Its improbably to get six 6's in a row but GIVEN that you have 5 sixes, getting a sixth is just 1/6
Am I right?
Gambler: "I already got five 6's. I must be on a roll! I'll surely get another one."
I won't hold my breath for them to produce anything of value here.
We almost solved image/speech recognition in the past 5 years. Once those works went out of academia to real application, the amount of disruption to the current society is pretty hard to imagine.
But we are getting closer.
[1]: http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/24/apple-responds-over-iphon...
The actual quote is, "Just avoid holding it in that way" which is different.
And Apple is not really good at machine learning either