You're right, and I suspect the GP would agree with you about there being real engineering applications for LLMs, diffusion models, etc But I think the term "A

You're right, and I suspect the GP would agree with you about there being real engineering applications for LLMs, diffusion models, etc But I think the term "AI Winter" usually refers to the underlying research programme and the economics around it. Soaking up many billions of dollars of industry money and public grants on the pitch that AGI might be just around the corner, and then being unable to deliver on that pitch can induce a hangover effect that makes it much harder to raise money for anything that smells even a little bit like the failed pitch. Investors and administrators feel burnt and turn very skeptical for a very long time. Meanwhile, the actual productive applications which shook out of the initial boom just get renamed to something else so that they don't carry that smell. We'll see how it goes here, but that's the familiar road and where the terminology comes from.