AI History 101 📚
Okay, settle down class.
Let's open our textbooks to page 6—and learn about the history of AI.
Image: Ken Jennings squaring off against IBM Watson in Jeopardy!
AI's journey has been marked by incredible breakthroughs over the past century.
Let’s hit the highlight reel.
Timeline of AI Breakthroughs
1936: Alan Turing introduced a theoretical model of computation that could simulate any computer algorithm, known as the Turing Machine. This evolutionary idea inspired generations of research that laid the groundwork to develop modern computers.
1950: Turing proposed the Turing Test in his seminal paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," evaluating a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from humans.
1956: the Dartmouth Workshop is considered the birthplace of AI, where researchers such as John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky laid the groundwork for future research in the field, including reasoning and problem-solving.
1986: One of Geoffrey Hinton's most influential contributions was his work on the backpropagation algorithm—now considered essential for training multi-layered neural networks, allowing them to learn complex patterns. Hinton co-authored the 1986 paper that popularized the technique: "Learning representations by back-propagating errors."
1997: IBM Deep Blue's expert system defeats chess champion Garry Kasparov.
2011: IBM Watson wins Jeopardy!, showcasing AI's ability to understand and process natural language in real time.
2012: Deep learning takes off with AlexNet, a deep convolutional neural network that achieved breakthrough performance in the ImageNet challenge.
2018: Transformer models advance natural language processing (NLP) with BERT.
2022: Often compared to the internet and the iPhone moments, ChatGPT's release reignited the AGI debate. Before GPT-3.5, AI was predominantly applied to narrow use cases. ChatGPT demonstrated that a single AI model can be applied to a wide range of use cases, including creative writing, translation, coding, and Q&A.
With AI agents rapidly evolving, is AGI near?
Are Manus AI & DeepSeek the next big ticket items?
I'll take neural networks and chill for 200 😉
