Comment by brabel
There have been at least 3 waves of AI before the LLM generation. 70s , 80s and late 90s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
Early 2010s had a lot of neural networks AI stuff going on and it certainly became a minor hype cycle as well though that kind of resulted in the current LLM wave.
There was also a small chatbot bubble around 2014-2016 (Microsoft Tay kinda blew it out of the water, and it never recovered), though companies did seem a bit skittish about using the term 'AI' at that point.