my sense is that AI winter as a term is mainly useful for thinking about, like, academic funding and really basic levels of breathless press coverage and rhetoric. so like after this all blows up maybe people chugging along researching symbolic AI will be in something they could meaningfully call an AI winter again, and it was useful in terms of comparatively analyzing the news rhetoric around this stuff from a couple of years ago, at least before the ascension of madness of doomer-pilled silicon valley rhetoric.

but in terms of raw finances LLMs have occasioned a world-historically overleveraged global economy in a way that so far exceeds "hmm i guess we're not getting grants like we used to" that for all practical purposes we're in an entirely new domain. like instead of a balmy ai summer we've found ourselves on the surface of venus