The History of AI

Key moments that shaped the field

1950s

The Birth of AI

Alan Turing proposes the Turing Test and the term Artificial Intelligence is coined at the Dartmouth Conference (1956).

Turing Test (1950) Dartmouth (1956) Logic Theorist (1956)
1960s–1970s

Early Systems

Expert systems and natural language processing emerge; the first AI winter follows due to limited compute and funding.

ELIZA (1966) Expert Systems First AI Winter
1980s–1990s

Renaissance

Machine learning proliferates, neural networks gain traction, and industry adoption accelerates.

Backpropagation (1986) ML Tooling Industry Use
2000s–2010s

Big Data Era

Deep learning breakthroughs enabled by big data and GPU compute usher in modern AI.

Deep Learning (2006) ImageNet (2012) AlphaGo (2016)

AI Today

Explore current fields and applications

Machine Learning

Machine Learning

Supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning algorithms.

  • Supervised Learning
  • Unsupervised Learning
  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Transfer Learning
Deep Learning

Deep Learning

Neural networks learning complex representations.

  • CNNs
  • RNNs
  • Transformers
  • GANs
Natural Language Processing

Natural Language Processing

Understanding and generating human language.

  • Large Language Models
  • Summarization
  • Sentiment Analysis
  • Translation
Computer Vision

Computer Vision

Understanding images and video at scale.

  • Image Recognition
  • Object Detection
  • Facial Recognition
  • Medical Imaging

The Future of AI

Emerging technologies and societal impact

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

Machines that can generalize across tasks approaching human-level capability.

2025–2030 2030–2040 2040+

Emerging Technologies

Quantum AI

Quantum computing paired with AI for previously intractable problems.

Brain-Computer Interfaces

Direct human–AI interfaces enabling new forms of cognition.

Autonomous Systems

Self-driving vehicles, drones, and robotics operating independently.

AI Ethics & Governance

Standards and policy ensuring safe and beneficial AI.

Societal Impact

Industry 5.0

Human–AI collaboration at scale in manufacturing.

Healthcare

Personalized medicine and AI-powered diagnostics.

Education

Adaptive learning and intelligent tutoring systems.

Climate

AI for renewable energy and environmental monitoring.