AI winter - update

Almost six months ago (May 28th 2018) I posted the "AI winter is well on its way" post that went viral. The post amassed nearly a quarter million views and got picked up in Bloomberg, Forbes, Politico, Venturebeat, BBC, Datascience Podcast and numerous other smaller media outlets and blogs [1, 2, 3, 4, ...], triggered violent debate on Hacker news and Reddit. I could not have anticipated this post to be so successful and hence I realized I touched on a very sensitive subject. One can agree with my claims or not, but the sheer popularity of the post almost itself serves as a proof that something is going on behind the scenes and people are actually curious and doubtful if there is anything solid behind the AI hype. Since the post made a prediction, that the AI hype is cracking (particularly in the space of autonomous vehicles) and as a result we will have another "AI winter" episode, I decided to periodically go over those claims, see what has changed and bring some new evidence.