Liron Shapira Host of Doom Debates, the #1 show for high-stakes debate about AI extinction risk.

“The reason why I think nobody's said the word AI winter for a couple of years, like after 2023, people are like, okay, this is a nice AI summer. We're probably going to head into AI winter. But it's like, oh, AI winter is canceled. And I think the reason is now because the AI itself is doing so much AI research and there's so many cascading effects. Like we've cracked enough of the problem wide open that I think we're done with AI winters. I think it's just AI summer till the end now.”

Doom Debates! · AI Research & Frontier Labs · October 2026

Context

Liron and Robert Wright are talking about how long it has been since anyone seriously talked about an AI winter, the old pattern of progress stalling after a burst. Liron lists the earlier AI seasons, then argues the cycle is over because AI is now helping to do AI research. It is a claim about why progress will keep compounding rather than stall.

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Transcript

Doom Debates! Around 13:59 into the episode

Liron Shapira

Can I make another high-level observation? When was the last time you even entertained the idea of AI winter?

Robert Wright

…discernible AI progress. When was the last AI winter? I guess it was almost pre-deep learning, right? I mean, the deep learning thing really kind of blew up with AlexNet, the image recognition thing in around, what, 2014? That's when it really, you know, rose its head and got a lot of attention.

Liron Shapira

…you know, like, oh my God, computers can find like shortest path algorithms. That was kind of like the first AI summer, right? Where the algorithms were more structured and like, oh, my God, computers can play chess. Okay, but now they're stuck on like moving robots around. They're stuck on doing fuzzy things. Oh, wait, deep learning kind of works. Right. So we used to have these AI seasons, but the reason why I think nobody's said the word AI winter for a couple of years, like after 2023, people are like, okay, this is a nice AI summer. We're probably going to head into AI winter. But it's like, oh, AI winter is canceled. And I think the reason is now because the AI itself is doing so much AI research and there's so many cascading effects. Like we've cracked enough of the problem wide open that I think we're done with AI winters. I think it's just AI summer till the end now.

Robert Wright

Yeah. And I mean, even if you suddenly had an AI, I went or even if there were no new generations for a couple of years, we would have our hands full, I think, assimilating the consequences of what we've already gone. This stuff is just starting to work through the economy and all kinds of…

Liron Shapira

screen share? Because I have the video open. You want to try to use that feature?

Robert Wright

We, I mean, as fast as we're going to try to get this up, honestly, I'm not sure about the wisdom of trying to integrate that. I mean, it's Friday. If you, I mean, you can do one and we can probably, well, we can either

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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