History of Artificial Intelligence

Exploring the fascinating journey from early concepts to modern breakthroughs

1943

McCulloch and Pitts publish 'A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity', laying the groundwork for neural networks.

1948

Norbert Wiener publishes 'Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine', establishing key concepts in feedback systems and control theory.

1950

Alan Turing publishes 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence', introducing the Turing Test to evaluate machine intelligence.

1956

The Dartmouth Conference marks the birth of AI as a field, where John McCarthy coins the term 'artificial intelligence'.

1958

Frank Rosenblatt introduces the perceptron, an early neural network model capable of learning.

1956

Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon develop the Logic Theorist, the first AI program capable of proving mathematical theorems.

1957

Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon, and J. C. Shaw develop the General Problem Solver (GPS), a program designed to mimic human problem-solving.

1958

John McCarthy develops LISP, a programming language that becomes foundational in AI research.

1966

Joseph Weizenbaum creates ELIZA, an early natural language processing program that simulates conversation.

1966-1972

Shakey the Robot, developed at SRI International, becomes the first general-purpose mobile robot capable of reasoning about its actions.

1970s-1980s

A decline in funding and interest in AI research, known as the 'AI winter', occurs due to unmet expectations.

1970s-1990sControversial Research

Project Stargate, a U.S. government initiative exploring remote viewing for intelligence purposes, is conducted until its termination in 1995.

1980

Expert systems gain prominence as AI research revives, alongside renewed interest in neural networks.

1986

Rumelhart, Hinton, and Williams popularize the backpropagation algorithm, revitalizing neural network research.

1997

IBM's Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a historic match.

2009

The ImageNet dataset is released, providing a large-scale resource for advancing computer vision research.

2011

IBM's Watson wins on Jeopardy!, showcasing advances in natural language processing and information retrieval.

2012

AlexNet, a deep convolutional neural network, achieves a breakthrough in image recognition by winning the ImageNet competition.

2013

Google introduces Word2Vec, a model that learns word embeddings, significantly advancing natural language processing.

2014

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are introduced, enabling AI to generate realistic data.

2017

The Transformer architecture, introduced in 'Attention Is All You Need', revolutionizes natural language processing.

2018

BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is introduced, setting new benchmarks in language understanding.

Recent AI Revolution (2019-2025)

43 events • Detailed monthly timeline

January 2019LLM

OpenAI introduces GPT-2, a large language model capable of generating human-like text, though its full version is initially withheld due to misuse concerns.

May 2019Search

Google deploys a BERT-based search algorithm to improve natural language understanding in search results.

June 2019Tools

Facebook (Meta) releases PyTorch 1.1, reinforcing its position as a leading machine learning framework.

October 2019Reinforcement Learning

DeepMind's AlphaStar reaches Grandmaster level in StarCraft II, demonstrating advanced strategic reasoning.

December 2019Business

OpenAI transitions from a non-profit to a 'capped-profit' model to secure funding for future research.

2020LLM

OpenAI releases GPT-3, a language model with 175 billion parameters that sets new standards in natural language generation.

January 2020Healthcare

Google Health develops an AI system for breast cancer detection that outperforms human radiologists.

July 2020Science

DeepMind's AlphaFold demonstrates a breakthrough in protein folding prediction at CASP14, revolutionizing biological research.

September 2020Business

Microsoft exclusively licenses GPT-3 from OpenAI, integrating advanced language models into its products.

December 2020Ethics

Timnit Gebru's departure from Google sparks widespread debate on ethics in AI research.

2021Science

DeepMind releases the full AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, providing open access to predicted protein structures.

January 2021Generative AI

OpenAI introduces DALL·E, a model that generates images from text descriptions, marking a leap in multimodal AI.

April 2021Tools

Meta announces the PyTorch Foundation to accelerate AI research and community development.

August 2021Tools

GitHub Copilot is released in technical preview, offering AI-assisted code suggestions powered by OpenAI Codex.

October 2021Business

Facebook rebrands as Meta, reflecting a strategic shift toward building the metaverse with integrated AI.

November 2021LLM

DeepMind releases Gopher, a 280 billion parameter language model pushing the boundaries of natural language understanding.

2022LLM

OpenAI releases ChatGPT, sparking widespread public interest in conversational AI.

January 2022LLM

Google's LaMDA gains attention following claims of sentience, highlighting debates on AI consciousness.

April 2022Generative AI

OpenAI releases DALL·E 2, an enhanced image generation model building on its predecessor's capabilities.

July 2022LLM

DeepMind introduces Chinchilla, demonstrating that smaller models trained on more data can outperform larger counterparts.

August 2022Generative AI

Stability AI releases Stable Diffusion as open-source software, democratizing image generation.

October 2022Generative AI

Meta releases Make-A-Video, a model for text-to-video generation, expanding AI's creative capabilities.

December 2022Business

ChatGPT reaches one million users within five days of launch, highlighting the rapid adoption of conversational AI.

January 2023Business

Microsoft announces a multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, bolstering the development of advanced AI models.

February 2023LLM

Google launches Bard AI, a conversational service designed to rival ChatGPT.

March 2023LLM

OpenAI releases GPT-4, showcasing significant improvements in reasoning and multimodal capabilities.

March 2023Ethics

The Future of Life Institute publishes an open letter calling for a pause on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, sparking global debate on AI safety.

February 2023LLM

Meta releases LLaMA 1, its first set of foundation language models, marking a significant contribution to open research in AI.

May 2023Ethics

Sam Altman testifies before the U.S. Congress on AI regulation, highlighting the need for balanced policy oversight.

July 2023LLM

Anthropic releases Claude 2, an advanced language model with improved reasoning and extended context capabilities.

July 2023LLM

Meta launches LLaMA 2 as an open-source follow-up to its earlier language models, further democratizing AI research.

October 2023MultiAI

OpenAI unveils GPT-4V, integrating vision capabilities into its flagship language model.

November 2023Business

Internal boardroom drama at OpenAI leads to the brief firing and subsequent rehiring of CEO Sam Altman.

December 2023MultiAI

Google announces Gemini, a new multimodal AI model designed to compete with GPT-4.

December 2023Ethics

The European Union reaches a provisional agreement on the AI Act, the world's first comprehensive regulatory framework for AI.

January 2024LLM

Anthropic releases Claude 3, claiming improvements in performance and reasoning over its predecessor.

February 2024Generative AI

OpenAI launches Sora, an advanced text-to-video model that pushes the boundaries of multimodal AI.

March 2024Ethics

The EU Parliament formally approves the AI Act, establishing risk-based regulations for AI systems.

March 2024MultiAI

OpenAI releases GPT-4o, a variant of GPT-4 with enhanced performance, voice capabilities, and vision features.

April 2024LLM

Meta launches LLaMA 3, continuing its commitment to open-source language model research.

May 2024LLM

Google releases Gemini 1.5 Pro, featuring a context window of 1 million tokens for advanced language modeling.

2024Ethics

The EU AI Act is fully approved, marking a milestone in comprehensive AI regulation.

March 2025LLM

OpenAI releases GPT-5, demonstrating significant advancements in AI reasoning, creativity, and multimodal integration.