Visibly the sentiment has quite considerably declined, there are much fewer tweets praising deep learning as the ultimate algorithm, the papers are becoming less “revolutionary” and much more “evolutionary”. Deepmind hasn’t shown anything breathtaking since their Alpha Go zero [and even that wasn’t that exciting, given the obscene amount of compute necessary and applicability to games only - see Moravec’s paradox]. OpenAI was rather quiet, with their last media outburst being the Dota 2 playing agent [which I suppose was meant to create as much buzz as Alpha Go, but fizzled out rather quickly]. In fact articles began showing up that even Google in fact does not know what to do with Deepmind, as their results are apparently not as practical as originally expected… As for the prominent researchers, they’ve been generally touring around meeting with government officials in Canada or France to secure their future grants, Yann Lecun even stepped down (rather symbolically) from the Head of Research to Chief AI scientist at Facebook. This gradual shift from rich, big corporations to government sponsored institutes suggests to me that the interest in this kind of research within these corporations (I think of Google and Facebook) is actually slowly winding down. Again these are all early signs, nothing spoken out loud, just the body language.