Maybe true, but &quot;stone-old&quot; ideas don&#x27;t mean &quot;bad ideas&quot;.  Neural networks were &quot;stone old&quot; until all this big data stuff went crazy and now suddenly they&#x27;re on the frontpage of hacker news all the time again and people think they&#x27;re the New Hotness (TM).  Similar with many long-forgotten functional programming techniques which are being talked about as new stuff, much of it is refinements of old ideas, but finally hitting the mainstream.<p>The AI Winter is thawing... but whose lap will it fall into after the defrost?  Big data mining organizations, or everyday hackers, or....?