winter

October to December reframed as a training montage: gym, no drinking, early nights, emerging in January as a new person. A self-improvement season with the vocabulary of a shonen anime, and the reason gyms were full in November.

A period when funding, faith and jobs in AI dry up after the promises fail. Named at a 1984 conference panel that correctly predicted the second one, by analogy with nuclear winter; the first had followed the 1973 Lighthill report. The phrase went dormant after 2012, when deep learning made it unsayable, and came back in 2023 as a threat in every column about the bubble.

The long cold stretch after a boom — the phrase for 2018–19 and again for 2022–23, borrowed from 'nuclear winter' with the drama intact. The scene's word for the season when the memes stop and the survivors post about building.

The period from roughly May 2022 to the end of 2023 in which NFT trading volume fell by more than ninety per cent from its January 2022 peak, floor prices of the big collections fell with it, and the phrase 'crypto winter' was borrowed for pictures. The record dates its end to the spring of 2024, when volumes rose for a season and people stopped saying it. They did not start saying 'summer'.