Artificial Intelligence

1950 – ongoing52 items

aitechnology
The Mark I Perceptron at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, Buffalo, in a photograph released by the US Navy on 24 June 1960. The letter C is in front of its camera “eye”. National Museum of the U.S. Navy. Public domain.
The Mark I Perceptron at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, Buffalo, in a photograph released by the US Navy on 24 June 1960. The letter C is in front of its camera “eye”. National Museum of the U.S. Navy. Public domain.

Seventy years of trying to make machines think

From Alan Turing’s question in 1950 to the Nobel Prizes of 2024. The field has run in cycles: bold promises and generous funding, then a winter when the promises came due, then a return under a new name. Read the events against the bands:

  • The first boom (1956–1974): logic, search and optimism

  • The first AI winter (1974–1980)

  • The expert-systems boom (1980–1987)

  • The second AI winter (1987–1993)

  • Statistical machine learning (1993–2012)

  • Deep learning (2012 on), and large language models over it

The winters are a historians’ convention, not events with dates. The first is usually put at 1974–1980; the second starts in 1987 and ends anywhere from 1993 to the late 1990s, depending on whose history you read. The bands use the common choice.

Threads

Filter by tag to follow one line through the cycles: symbolic ai for logic and rules, neural networks for the idea that fell out of favour twice and won in the end, language, games, hardware, and funding for the money whose arrival and departure made the booms and the winters.

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done. — Alan Turing, the last line of “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, 1950

Items

  1. Turing asks “Can machines think?”

  2. Strachey’s draughts program

    Victoria University of Manchester

  3. “Artificial intelligence” named

  4. The first AI boom

    18 years

  5. Dartmouth Summer Research Project

    2 months · Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

  6. The Logic Theorist

    RAND Corporation, Main Street, Santa Monica

  7. McCarthy invents Lisp

    MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts

  8. The Navy shows off the perceptron

    Washington, D.C.

  9. Samuel’s checkers player learns

  10. Mark I Perceptron demonstrated

    Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, Buffalo

  11. Shakey the robot

    6 years · SRI, Ravenswood Avenue, Menlo Park

  12. ELIZA

    MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts

  13. The ALPAC report

  14. Minsky and Papert’s “Perceptrons”

  15. Prolog

    Luminy campus, Marseille

  16. The Lighthill debate

    Royal Institution, Albemarle Street, London

  17. The Lighthill report

  18. First AI winter

    6 years

  19. MYCIN tested against the experts

    Stanford University

  20. The expert-systems boom

    ≈ 7 years

  21. R1 goes to work at DEC

  22. Japan’s Fifth Generation project

    ≈ 10 years, 2 months · ICOT, Mita, Minato, Tokyo

  23. Hopfield networks

  24. Backpropagation in Nature

  25. Second AI winter

    ≈ 6 years

  26. The Lisp-machine market collapses

  27. LeCun’s network reads zip codes

    Bell Labs, Holmdel, New Jersey

  28. TD-Gammon

    IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights

  29. Statistical machine learning

    ≈ 19 years

  30. Deep Blue beats Kasparov

    Equitable Center, New York

  31. Long short-term memory

  32. Stanley wins the DARPA Grand Challenge

    Primm, Nevada

  33. ImageNet

    Princeton University

  34. Watson wins Jeopardy!

    IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights

  35. Deep learning

  36. AlexNet wins ImageNet

    University of Toronto

  37. word2vec

  38. Generative adversarial networks

    Université de Montréal

  39. AlphaGo v Lee Sedol

    6 days · Four Seasons Hotel, Seoul

  40. Game 2: move 37

    Four Seasons Hotel, Seoul

  41. Game 4: Lee’s move 78

    Four Seasons Hotel, Seoul

  42. “Attention Is All You Need”

  43. Large language models

  44. BERT

  45. Turing Award for deep learning

  46. GPT-3

  47. AlphaFold 2 at CASP14

  48. ChatGPT released

  49. AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park

    Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire

  50. EU AI Act enters into force

  51. Nobel Prize in Physics: Hopfield and Hinton

    Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm

  52. Nobel Prize in Chemistry: AlphaFold

    Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm