History of AI
From the 1956 Dartmouth workshop to the deep-learning boom.
- ✓Key milestones that shaped AI
- ✓What the 'AI winters' were and why they happened
- ✓Why 2012 was a turning point
Explanation
The term 'Artificial Intelligence' was coined in 1956 at the Dartmouth workshop, where researchers believed human-level intelligence was a few decades away.
Progress came in waves. Early excitement was followed by AI winters — periods in the 1970s and late 1980s when funding dried up because the technology over-promised and under-delivered.
The modern era began in 2012, when a deep neural network called AlexNet crushed an image-recognition competition. Cheap GPUs, huge datasets, and better algorithms suddenly made deep learning practical. The 2017 Transformer architecture then unlocked today's large language models.
The jump from 2012 (AlexNet) to today's chatbots took roughly a decade — a reminder of how fast the field now moves once the right pieces (data, compute, architecture) line up.
- • Believing AI progress is smooth — it has historically come in boom-and-bust cycles.
Build a 5-point timeline of AI from 1956 to today and label one milestone you find most surprising.
1. What were the 'AI winters'?