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Artificial intelligence(AI ) has forced its way into the public consciousness thanks to the Parousia of powerful new AI chatbots and image generator . But the line of business has a retentive chronicle stretch back to thedawn of reckon . Given how fundamental AI could be in changing how we live on in the coming old age , understanding the stem of this tight - developing field is crucial . Here are 12 of the most significant milestones in the account of AI .

1950 — Alan Turing’s seminal AI paper

Renowned British computer scientistAlan Turingpublisheda papertitled " Computing Machinery and Intelligence , " which was one of the first detailed investigations of the interrogation " Can car think ? " .

answer this question requires you to first tackle the challenge of defining " machine " and " recollect . " So , instead , he proposed a secret plan : An observer would watch a conversation between a motorcar and a human and seek to make up one’s mind which was which . If they could n’t do so reliably , the simple machine would win the game . While this did n’t prove a machine was " think , " the Turing Test — as it came to be get laid — has been an crucial yardstick for AI progress ever since .

1956 — The Dartmouth workshop

AI as a scientific discipline can decipher its source back to theDartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence , held at Dartmouth College in 1956 . The participants were a who ’s who of influential computer scientists , let in John McCarthy , Marvin Minsky and Claude Shannon . This was the first metre the term " artificial intelligence " was used as the mathematical group spent almost two month discussing how political machine might simulate learnedness and word . The coming together boot - started serious research on AI and laid the base for many of the breakthroughs that came in the following decades .

1966 — First AI chatbot

MIT researcher Joseph Weizenbaum unveiled the first - ever AI chatbot , live asELIZA . The underlying software was rudimentary and regurgitated canned responses base on the   keywords it detected in the prompt . Nonetheless , when Weizenbaum programmed ELIZA to act as a psychotherapist , mass were reportedly astounded at how convincing the conversations were . The piece of work stimulated growinginterest in natural language processing , including from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ( DARPA ) , which provided considerable backing for early AI research .

1974-1980 — First “AI winter”

It did n’t take long before other enthusiasm for AI begin to fade . The fifties and sixties had been a prolific time for the field , but in their enthusiasm , leading experts made sheer claims about what political machine would be capable of doing in the near futurity . The technology ’s failure to live up to those expectations led to growing discontent . Ahighly decisive reporton the theater by British mathematician James Lighthill led the U.K. government to cut almost all funding for AI research . DARPA also drastically snub back funding around this metre , leading to what would become known as the first " AI winter . "

1980 — Flurry of “expert systems”

Despite disenchantment with AI in many quarter , research continued — and by the start of the 1980s , the engineering was start to pick up the eye of the individual sector . In 1980 , researchers at Carnegie Mellon University built anAI system call R1for the Digital Equipment Corporation . The program was an " expert system of rules " — an coming to AI that researchers had been try out with since the sixties . These scheme used logical formula to reason through big database of specialist knowledge . The computer program saved the company trillion of dollars a yr and kicked off a boom in diligence deployments of expert systems .

1986 — Foundations of deep learning

Most research thus far had focused on " symbolical " AI , which rely on handcraft logic and knowledge databases . But since the giving birth of the area , there was also a rival stream of research into " connectionist " approach that were inspire by the brain . This had continued quiet in the background and at long last follow to light in the 1980s . Rather than programing systems by hand , these technique ask coaxing " artificial neural meshwork " to get a line rules by training on data . In possibility , this would lead to more whippy AI not encumber by the Creator ’s preconceptions , but educate neuronal internet prove challenge . In 1986 , Geoffrey Hinton , who would later be dubbed one of the " godfather of deep learning , " publisheda paperpopularizing " backpropagation "   — the grooming technique underpinning most AI systems today .

1987-1993 — Second AI winter

1997 — Deep Blue’s defeat of Garry Kasparov

Despite repeated gold rush and busts , AI research made steady progress during the 1990s largely out of the public heart . That changed in 1997 , when Deep Blue — an expert scheme build by IBM — beat chess world champion Garry Kasparov ina six - game serial . Aptitude in the complex game had long been seen by AI researcher as a key marker of advancement . get the better of the humans ’s near human player , therefore , was interpret as a major milestone and made headline around the globe .

2012 — AlexNet ushers in the deep learning era

Despite a full-bodied body of academic work , neural networks were check as airy for real - domain applications . To be useful , they needed to have many layers of neurons , but follow through large networks on schematic computer hardware was prohibitively inefficient . In 2012 , Alex Krizhevsky , a doctoral scholar of Hinton , won the ImageNet computer vision competition by a large security deposit with a inscrutable - learning model calledAlexNet . The secret was to use specialised chips called artwork processing unit ( GPUs ) that could expeditiously extend much deeper networks . This plant the stage for the inscrutable - learning revolution that has power most AI kick upstairs ever since .

2016 — AlphaGo’s defeat of Lee Sedol

While AI had already left chess in its rearview mirror , the much more complex Taiwanese panel biz Go had remained a challenge . But in 2016 , Google DeepMind’sAlphaGobeat Lee Sedol , one of the world ’s greatest Go players , over a five - game serial . Experts had take on such a exploit was still years away , so the effect led to growing fervour around AI ’s progress . This was part due to the general - purpose nature of the algorithms underlying AlphaGo , which swear on an approach called " reinforcement eruditeness . " In this proficiency , AI systems in effect learn through trial and error . DeepMind later stretch out and improve the approach to createAlphaZero , which can learn itself to play a wide potpourri of game .

2017 — Invention of the transformer architecture

Despite significant progress in computer vision and game acting , deep eruditeness was make slower progress with language tasks . Then , in 2017 , Google researchers published a novel nervous net architecture call a " transformer , " which could ingest vast sum of data and make connectedness between remote data decimal point . This proved especially useful for the complex task of speech communication moulding and made it potential to make AIs that could at the same time tackle a variety of tasks , such as translation , school text generation and document summarization . All of today ’s go AI models rely on this architecture , include icon generators like OpenAI’sDALL - E , as well as Google DeepMind ’s rotatory protein folding modelAlphaFold 2 .

2022 – Launch of ChatGPT

On Nov. 30 , 2022 , OpenAI release a chatbot power by its GPT-3 large speech communication theoretical account . know as " ChatGPT , " the tool became a worldwide sensation , garnering more than a million user in less than a week and 100 million by the undermentioned month . It was the first time members of the public could interact with the latest AI models — and most were blown away . The service is credited with set out an AI boom that has seen billion of dollar bill invested in the field and spawned legion copycats from handsome tech companies and startup . It has also led to grow uneasiness about the pace of AI progress , promptingan open letterfrom prominent technical school leader calling for a suspension in AI research to countenance clip to measure the conditional relation of the applied science .

"go" player Lee Sedol plays against an AI program

A black and white photo of Alan Turing

A black and white photo of men smiling and sitting on the grass

An image of the screen of the ELIZA program. It shows a chat between ELIZA. and a user.

A retro photo of a room of abandoned computers

An abstract graphic illustration of purple, pink, and blue squares and dots

A photo of Geoffrey Hinton speaking at a conference in 2023

A hand rests on an old computer keyboard

Garry Kasparov holds his head in his hands while sitting at a chessboard

A close-up of a crypto mining rig

An artist’s representation of a flowing network of lights

Pleased programmer proud of making sentient artificial intelligence ask existential questions.

Abstract image of binary data emitted from AGI brain.

an illustration with two silhouettes of faces facing each other, with gears in their heads

Artificial intelligence brain in network node.

Robot and young woman face to face.

A robot caught underneath a spotlight.

A clock appears from a sea of code.

An artist�s illustration of network communication.

lady justice with a circle of neon blue and a dark background

An illustration of a robot holding up a mask of a smiling human face.

A photo of a volcano erupting at night with the Milky Way visible in the sky

A painting of a Viking man on a boat wearing a horned helmet

The sun in a very thin crescent shape during a solar eclipse

Paintings of animals from Lascaux cave

Stonehenge, Salisbury, UK, July 30, 2024; Stunning aerial view of the spectacular historical monument of Stonehenge stone circles, Wiltshire, England, UK.

A collage of three different robots

An image of a rainbow-colored circular cloud with sparkling stars behind it