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I have read this blog post When Will My Site Graduate?. The author states

At 90 days into beta, we're supposed to evaluate each Area 51 beta site and either “pass” or “fail” them as full Stack Exchange sites

How long have we been in public beta (even after being sponsored by IBM)? Don't we have enough sustainable users yet?

When will we exactly graduate?

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According to our Area 51 page, we entered public beta on August 22, 2016, nearly three years ago.

90 days may indeed have been the cutoff in the early days of Area 51-launched Stack Exchange sites, prior even to that post. The post opens with it because users of one small site were concerned about getting shut down at that mark. It reassures those users that graduation could take longer:

How long can a site stay in beta?

The simple answer is, it takes as long as it takes. We’ll wait. If a site needs more activity, go out and evangelize it. As long as your site shows steady progress and continues to make the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions, it will march on.

More recently (in 2015) there was a Meta Stack Exchange announcement with more specifics:

The TL;DR:

  1. When a site starts to consistently receive 10 questions/day, we’ll consider it for graduation.
  2. If a public beta site does not produce consistently helpful content, and lacks the caretakers needed for flags and spam to get handled and our Be Nice policy to be upheld, it will be closed.

We are not at risk of closure, so we'll definitely stick around in some form (perpetual beta is possible). According to the Area 51 stats, we get about 7.5 questions per day, so we're making progress toward graduation eligibility. Graduation includes privilege threshold adjustments, which we could survive now, but without any 10K users it's probably ideal to hold off for a while.

The sketched graph in this MSE answer visually shows "a typical growth pattern for a Stack Exchange site." Eyeballing our current site analytics, we seem to be at the halfway mark between the sketch's start of public beta and graduation.

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I know that the website graduated but I believe in the correct question should have been: when will https://ai.stackexchange.com be merged with https://datascience.stackexchange.com / http://stats.stackexchange.com?

It's pretty obvious from a quick glance at the https://ai.stackexchange.com's questions that the vast majority of questions posted here are also on-topic on https://datascience.stackexchange.com / http://stats.stackexchange.com. This issue was raised and discussed when https://ai.stackexchange.com was created, but it has never been fixed in practice.

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    $\begingroup$ My sense is we cover the critical theoretical aspects of AI, and have a much broader, general scope than the referenced stacks. For instance, it is a misconception that Artificial Intelligence only includes the recent statistical methods. The term AI was coined largely to refer to Symbolic AI aka "Good Old Fashioned AI". Additionally, we treat issues such as social impacts, philosophy, and mythology/mythologization of AI (i.e public misconceptions.) That said, we're working toward greater clarity in terms of distinction from overlapping stacks. $\endgroup$ – DukeZhou♦ Sep 11 at 20:22
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    $\begingroup$ Another subject we can cover here is history of the field. (informally, speaking as a generalist, I am often astonished at the lack of knowledge of the history of scientific fields by many engaged in those fields. For instance, even PhD's in the AI field usually don't know what the first operational AI was, assuming it was some or other early chess engine.) This is similar to the misconception that computing began with integrated circuits... $\endgroup$ – DukeZhou♦ Sep 11 at 20:45
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    $\begingroup$ @DukeZhou in theory you're right, but in practice looking at the actual questions, the SE websites greatly overlap and look redundant. $\endgroup$ – Franck Dernoncourt Sep 12 at 4:11
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    $\begingroup$ Partly my fault, as I need to get more strict on closures. Some of the overlap areas are not direct competencies for me, so I've traditionally depended on trusted users, ideally those also trusted on the overlap stacks. But I'm starting to get a better sense of what needs to be closed/migrated. $\endgroup$ – DukeZhou♦ Sep 12 at 21:33

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