Alan Turing
Father of theoretical computer science and AI. His work laid the mathematical foundations for computing.
History of AI
A journey through decades of innovation, breakthroughs, and transformative discoveries
The Dream of Thinking Machines
The quest to create intelligent machines is as old as civilization itself, from ancient myths of mechanical beings to Leonardo da Vinci's automata designs. But the scientific pursuit of artificial intelligence began in earnest in the mid-20th century, when pioneers dared to ask: "Can machines think?"
This timeline traces the major milestones that shaped AI from a theoretical concept to the transformative technology that touches every aspect of modern life.
Milestones
AI Through the Ages
1950
The Turing Test
Alan Turing publishes "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," proposing the famous test for machine intelligence. He asks: "Can machines think?" and establishes the philosophical foundations of AI.
1956
Birth of AI
The Dartmouth Conference, organized by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, and others, officially coins the term "Artificial Intelligence" and establishes AI as a distinct field of research.
1966
ELIZA - First Chatbot
Joseph Weizenbaum creates ELIZA at MIT, demonstrating natural language processing through pattern matching. Users became emotionally attached, revealing the power of conversational AI.
1974-1980
First AI Winter
Reduced funding and interest as early promises failed to materialize. The limitations of symbolic AI became apparent, and governments cut research budgets.
1986
Backpropagation
Rumelhart, Hinton, and Williams popularize backpropagation for training neural networks, reviving interest in connectionist approaches and laying groundwork for deep learning.
1997
Deep Blue Defeats Kasparov
IBM's Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov, demonstrating that machines can outperform humans in complex strategic reasoning tasks.
2011
Watson Wins Jeopardy!
IBM Watson defeats human champions on Jeopardy!, showcasing advances in natural language understanding and question answering capabilities.
2012
Deep Learning Revolution
AlexNet wins ImageNet competition by a large margin using deep convolutional networks. This breakthrough ignites the modern deep learning era and attracts massive industry investment.
2016
AlphaGo Masters Go
DeepMind's AlphaGo defeats world champion Lee Sedol at Go, a game once thought to be too complex for machines due to its vast search space and need for intuition.
2017
Transformer Architecture
Google introduces the Transformer in "Attention Is All You Need," revolutionizing NLP and enabling the development of large language models that would follow.
2022
ChatGPT Goes Viral
OpenAI's ChatGPT reaches 100 million users in just two months, becoming the fastest-growing consumer application in history and bringing AI to the mainstream.
2024
Multimodal Integration
Models like GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro achieve seamless real-time reasoning across audio, vision, and text, blurring the line between human and machine interaction.
2025
Embodied Intelligence
AI moves beyond screens into the physical world. General-purpose humanoid robots enter industrial pilots, and "Spatial Intelligence" enables machines to understand and navigate complex 3D environments.
Pioneers
Visionaries of AI
Marvin Minsky
Co-founder of MIT's AI lab and pioneer of neural networks and cognitive science.
Geoffrey Hinton
"Godfather of Deep Learning" whose work on neural networks enabled the modern AI revolution.
Fei-Fei Li
Creator of ImageNet, which catalyzed the deep learning breakthrough in computer vision.