AI winter happened in the early 1980s after the (Lisp) machine learning crowd got a lot of funding, a bunch of startups, but failed to convert that into profit. So then it collapsed: not because their algorithms were bad, but because they couldn&#x27;t find ways to make the algorithms profitable.<p>What I&#x27;m looking for in the current AI hype is profit. Will IBM be successful in making Watson turn a profit? Will Google leverage alphaGo technology to not just win games, but also make profit? A big one here is self-driving cars: if the AI becomes good enough to sell to the public, that will be a huge market for AI.<p>So that&#x27;s what I&#x27;m looking for. If the ideas become profitable, then AI will not enter into another winter.