Not the OP, but I've been through a few AI hype cycles and know of earlier ones, depending on what you count: ML more generally over the last half decade or so¹

Not the OP, but I've been through a few AI hype cycles and know of earlier ones, depending on what you count: ML more generally over the last half decade or so¹, the excitement around Watson (and Deep Blue before it), the second big bump in neural network interest in the mid/late 80s², there have been a couple of cycles regarding expert-system-like methods over the decades, etc. -- [1] though that has produced more useful output than some of the previous hype cycles, as I think will the current one as it seemingly already is doing [2] I was barely born for the start of the “AI winter” following the first such hype cycle