An AI winter is a period of reduced funding and interest in artificial intelligence research and development. Previous periods popularly described as major AI winters were the 1974-1980 and the 1987-1993 periods.

Between 1971-75 slow advances in speech recognition, the UK government's decision to end support for most AI research in universities, and DARPA's cuts to academic AI research funding led to the first AI winter, lasting until 1980.