Artificial Intelligence History

Artificial Intelligence as a formal discipline was born at the 1956 Dartmouth Conference, where John McCarthy coined the term. The field has experienced cycles of 'AI summers' (optimism and funding) and 'AI winters' (disappointment and cuts). Early AI focused on symbolic reasoning and rule-based systems; modern AI is dominated by machine learning (neural networks trained on data). Key milestones: IBM Deep Blue beats Garry Kasparov at chess (1997); Google AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol at Go (2016, a game thought to require human intuition); GPT-3 (2020) demonstrates emergent few-shot learning; ChatGPT (2022) reaches 100 million users in 2 months — the fastest adoption of any technology in history; GPT-4 (2023) passes the bar exam in the 90th percentile and medical licensing exam. The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for foundational work on neural networks (Hinton, Hopfield).