🕰️ History of AI

Turing proposes the Imitation Game

Frames "can machines think?" as a testable question.

Dartmouth workshop coins “artificial intelligence”

The field gets its name and founding agenda.

Rosenblatt builds the Perceptron

First trainable neural network — and first AI hype cycle.

Minsky & Papert publish “Perceptrons”

Exposes single-layer limits; helps trigger the first AI winter.

Backpropagation popularized (Rumelhart, Hinton, Williams)

Makes training multi-layer networks practical — the engine of everything since.

Deep Blue defeats Kasparov

A machine beats the world chess champion; search + compute wins.

LeCun’s LeNet reads checks with CNNs

Convolutional networks prove themselves in production.

AlexNet wins ImageNet

GPUs + deep CNNs crush the field — the deep-learning era begins.

GANs invented (Goodfellow)

Machines learn to generate; seeds today’s image generation.

OpenAI founded; DeepMind’s DQN masters Atari

Reinforcement learning + the lab that would ship ChatGPT.

AlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol

Intuition-like play in Go, a decade ahead of expectations.

“Attention Is All You Need” — the transformer

The architecture behind every modern frontier model.

BERT and GPT-1

Pretraining on raw text becomes the dominant paradigm.

GPT-3 (175B)

Scale produces few-shot abilities nobody explicitly programmed.

GitHub Copilot; DALL·E

AI starts writing code and making images for normal users.

Stable Diffusion open-sourced; ChatGPT launches

Image gen for everyone, then the fastest-growing app in history.

GPT-4, Claude, LLaMA leaks/open weights

Frontier reasoning arrives; the open-weights movement explodes.

Multimodal frontier models; o1 reasoning; Nobel Prizes for AI

Models see/hear/speak, think step-by-step; Hinton & Hassabis honored.

Agents go mainstream — coding agents, MCP, computer use

AI stops just answering and starts doing multi-step work.

Reasoning models commoditize; video generation matures; humanoids ship

Frontier capability spreads to open models; AI enters the physical world.