History of AI

The Story of AI

AI isn't new — people have dreamed of intelligent machines for centuries. But the science really started in the 1950s.

The Timeline

️ 1950s: The Birth of AI

• 1950: Alan Turing asks "Can machines think?" and proposes the Turing Test
• 1956: The term "Artificial Intelligence" is coined at Dartmouth Conference
• 1957: First neural network (Perceptron) is created

️ 1960s-1970s: Early Promise, Then "AI Winter"

• Early systems could solve puzzles and play games
• But they couldn't handle real-world complexity
• Funding dried up when promises weren't kept

** 1980s: Expert Systems**

• Computers encoded human expert knowledge as rules
• "If the patient has fever AND cough THEN maybe flu"
• Useful but brittle — couldn't learn new things

** 1990s-2000s: Machine Learning Emerges**

• Instead of programming rules, let computers learn from data
• Support Vector Machines, Random Forests
• IBM's Deep Blue beats chess champion (1997)

** 2010s: The Deep Learning Revolution**

• 2012: AlexNet crushes image recognition competition
• 2016: AlphaGo beats world Go champion
• Neural networks become practical with GPUs and big data

** 2020s: The Generative AI Era**

• GPT-3, GPT-4, Claude: Conversational AI
• DALL-E, Midjourney: AI art generation
• AI writes code, makes videos, assists in science

Key Insight

AI progress wasn't linear — it had "winters" and "springs." The current boom is powered by:

1. More data (the internet)
2. More compute (GPUs, TPUs)
3. Better algorithms (transformers, attention)