It seems to me that the core dilemma in the AI community has always been - is intelligence a "systems" problem or is it a "general" problem. It seems people first tried a series of general approaches and did not make much progress. Now that people are taking a series of bottom-up approaches in individual domains they are making a lot more progress. So maybe the AI winter is still on for the "general" approach but the thaw is well on its way for the "systems" approach.