Journey Through the Ages: AI's Spectacular Evolution
AI History Timeline
1950
Alan Turing throws a party, introducing the Turing test, and hinting at the future world of AI.
1951
Marvin Minsky and Dean Edmonds build SNARC, a massive brain-like machine with 3,000 vacuum tubes.
1952
Arthur Samuel creates a checkers-playing program that learns as it plays.
1956
The term "artificial intelligence" is coined by John McCarthy and pals, marking the official birth of AI.
1958
Frank Rosenblatt introduces the perceptron, an early brainy network, while John McCarthy whips up Lisp.
1959
Arthur Samuel coins "machine learning" (computers outsmarting their creators) and Oliver Selfridge dazzles with "Pandemonium," a learning model.
1964
Daniel Bobrow's STUDENT program shows off by solving algebra problems.
1965
Team Feigenbaum creates Dendral, a genius system for chemists.
1968
Terry Winograd's SHRDLU manipulates blocks in a virtual world, a real game-changer at the time.
1969
Arthur Bryson and Yu-Chi Ho enhance neural networks with backpropagation, and Minsky and Papert explore neural network limits in "Perceptrons."
1973
James Lighthill's report causes a British AI research funding hiccup.
1980
Symbolics Lisp machines hit the market, reviving AI interest.
1981
Danny Hillis designs parallel computers, a big leap towards today's powerful GPUs.
1984
Marvin Minsky and Roger Schank predict an AI winter, foreseeing industry challenges.
1985
Judea Pearl brings Bayesian networks into the spotlight.
1988
Peter Brown's team explores statistical language translation.
1989
Yann LeCun and friends showcase CNNs for handwriting recognition.
1997
Hochreiter and Schmidhuber's LSTM networks handle complex data, and IBM's Deep Blue chess triumph makes headlines.
2000
Montreal's brainiacs propose a new way to model language.
2006
Fei-Fei Li begins ImageNet, kickstarting an AI boom.
2009
Rajat Raina and team propose using GPUs for neural networks.
2011
Schmidhuber's team rocks a traffic sign contest with a CNN, and Apple introduces chatty Siri.
2012
Geoffrey Hinton's deep CNN wins the ImageNet challenge, causing a deep learning explosion.
2013
China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer and DeepMind's game-playing CNN make waves.
2014
Ian Goodfellow introduces GANs, Kingma and Welling reveal variational autoencoders, and Facebook's DeepFace recognizes faces like a pro.
2016
AlphaGo's victory over Lee Sedol and Uber's self-driving cars hit the headlines.
2017
Stanford explores diffusion models, and Google's "Attention Is All You Need" paper launches transformer models.
2018
Cimon assists astronauts in space, OpenAI unveils GPT, and Groove X's Lovot steals hearts.
2019
Microsoft's Turing NLG and Google's lung cancer detection algorithm show AI's growing impact.
2020
Oxford's AI COVID-19 test, OpenAI's GPT-3, and Nvidia's Omniverse redefine possibilities.
2021
OpenAI's Dall-E and UC San Diego's soft robot show AI's creative and physical capabilities.
2022
Google's Lamda controversy, DeepMind's AlphaTensor, Intel's deepfake detector, and ChatGPT's launch make for a busy year.
2023
GPT-4's multimodal abilities and the call for AI pause make headlines. Development and investment into the flied of AI is exploding.
Beyond 2024...
From business to healthcare, AI's influence grows. Gartner predicts AI's increasing role in decision-making, while neuromorphic processing and ethical considerations shape the future of AI.
Information from this timeline was inspired by this Tech Target article: "The history of artificial intelligence: Complete AI timeline".