- 1950: Alan Turing publishes Computing Machinery and Intelligence. In this paper, Turing—famous for breaking the German ==ENIGMA== code during WWII and often referred to as the “==father of computer science==”— asks the following question: “Can machines think?” From there, he offers a test, now famously known as the “Turing Test,” where a human interrogator would try to distinguish between a computer and human text response. While this test has undergone much scrutiny since it was published, it remains an important part of the history of AI, as well as an ongoing concept within philosophy as it utilizes ideas around linguistics.
![[1000044925.jpg]]
- 1956: John McCarthy coins the term “artificial intelligence” at the first-ever AI conference at Dartmouth College. (McCarthy would go on to invent the Lisp language.) Later that year, Allen Newell, J.C. Shaw, and Herbert Simon create the Logic Theorist, the first-ever running AI software program.
- 1967: Frank Rosenblatt builds the Mark 1 Perceptron, the first computer based on a neural network that “learned” though trial and error. Just a year later, Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert publish a book titled Perceptrons, which becomes both the landmark work on neural networks and, at least for a while, an argument against future neural network research projects.
- 1980s: Neural networks which use a backpropagation algorithm to train itself become widely used in AI applications.
- 1995: Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig publish Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (link resides outside ibm.com), which becomes one of the leading textbooks in the study of AI. In it, they delve into four potential goals or definitions of AI, which differentiates computer systems on the basis of rationality and thinking vs. acting.
- 1997: IBM’s Deep Blue beats then world chess champion Garry Kasparov, in a chess match (and rematch).
- 2004: John McCarthy writes a paper, What Is Artificial Intelligence? (link resides outside ibm.com), and proposes an often-cited definition of AI
- 2011: IBM Watson beats champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter at Jeopardy!
- 2015: Baidu’s Minwa supercomputer uses a special kind of deep neural network called a convolutional neural network to identify and categorize images with a higher rate of accuracy than the average human.
- 2016: DeepMind’s AlphaGo program, powered by a deep neural network, beats Lee Sodol, the world champion Go player, in a five-game match. The victory is significant given the huge number of possible moves as the game progresses (over 14.5 trillion after just four moves!). Later, Google purchased DeepMind for a reported USD 400 million.
- 2023: A rise in large language models, or LLMs, such as ChatGPT, create anenormous change in performance of AI and its potential to drive enterprise value. With these new generative AI practices, deep-learning models can be pre-trained on vast amounts of raw, unlabeled data.