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chronology of AI

Executive Summary

  • The history of Artificial Intelligence (AI) spans from mythological concepts to today’s deep learning and generative AI technologies.
  • Key periods include the foundation era (1940s-1950s), the creation of the term and field (1956 Dartmouth conference), “AI winters,” the emergence of expert systems, and breakthroughs in neural networks and deep learning.
  • Important figures include Alan Turing, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Andrew Ng, Yann LeCun, Demis Hassabis, and others.

Detailed Chronology of AI

Pre-20th Century

  • Antiquity–1800s: Myths and automata (e.g., Greek stories of Talos, mechanical automatons in the Middle Ages and Renaissance).

Early 20th Century Foundations

  • 1942: Alan Turing and the Bombe (code-breaking machine in WWII).[1][2]
  • 1943: McCulloch & Pitts create the first mathematical model of an artificial neuron.

1950s: The Birth of AI

  • 1950: Alan Turing publishes “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”; introduces the Turing Test as a measure of machine intelligence.
  • 1956: Dartmouth Conference—John McCarthy coins the term “Artificial Intelligence.”
    • Important people: John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, Claude Shannon.
  • 1958: Creation of LISP by John McCarthy, foundational in AI programming.

1960s: Symbolic AI and Chatbots

  • 1961: Unimate, first industrial robot, installed at General Motors.
  • 1964: Joseph Weizenbaum creates ELIZA, the first chatbot simulating conversation.
  • Late 1960s: Shakey the Robot—first general-purpose mobile robot.

1970s: Expert Systems and Early Applications

  • 1972: MYCIN, an expert system for diagnosing blood infections.
  • 1979: Stanford Cart crosses a room autonomously.

1980s: AI Boom and “AI Winter”

  • 1980–87: Expansion of expert systems in business.
  • Mid-late 1980s: AI research funding declines—the “AI winter”—due to high expectations and disappointing results.

1990s: Machine Learning Rises

  • 1997: IBM’s Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov.

2000s: Autonomous Systems and Big Data

  • 2005: Stanford’s Stanley wins the DARPA Grand Challenge (autonomous vehicles).

2010s: Deep Learning Explosion

  • 2012: Geoffrey Hinton and team win the ImageNet competition with AlexNet, revolutionizing deep learning.
  • 2016: AlphaGo, by DeepMind (Demis Hassabis), defeats Go champion Lee Sedol.
  • 2018: Google’s BERT model advances natural language processing.
  • 2019–: Generative AI—GPT-2, GPT-3 (OpenAI), BERT, DALL-E—achieves human-like text and image generation.

2020s: Generative AI and Mainstream Deployment

  • 2022–2025: Explosion in public AI adoption—ChatGPT, generative models, open-source AI.

Key People in AI

  • Alan Turing: Theoretical foundations, Turing test, cryptography.
  • John McCarthy: Coined “AI,” LISP, time-sharing systems.
  • Marvin Minsky: Symbolic AI, artificial neural networks.
  • Joseph Weizenbaum: Created ELIZA, chatbot pioneering.
  • Geoffrey Hinton: Deep learning, neural networks, “Father of deep learning.”
  • Yann LeCun: Convolutional neural networks.
  • Andrew Ng: Online AI education, Google Brain.
  • Fei-Fei Li: ImageNet, computer vision leadership.
  • Demis Hassabis: Founder of DeepMind, AlphaGo.

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November 20, 2025 ∙