History of AI

From the Turing Test to today's autonomous agents — the moments that shaped artificial intelligence, in plain language. Each milestone is one shift in what machines could do, why it mattered, and what changed because of it.

2025

DeepSeek R1

DeepSeek, a Chinese AI lab, releases R1 — an open-source reasoning model that matches or exceeds proprietary Western models at a fraction of the cost. Trained with novel reinforcement learning techniq…

2024

AI Agents Emerge

Autonomous AI agents — systems that can plan multi-step tasks, use tools, browse the web, and execute code — move from research demos to production. Software engineers start delegating entire features…

2023

EU AI Act

The European Union agrees on the AI Act — the world's first comprehensive legal framework for regulating artificial intelligence. It bans social scoring, restricts real-time facial recognition, and re…

2022

ChatGPT Launched

On November 30, OpenAI releases ChatGPT. Within five days, a million people are using it. Within two months, 100 million — the fastest technology adoption in human history. It isn't the most powerful …

2021

DALL-E — Text to Image

OpenAI unveils DALL-E, a model that generates images from text descriptions: "an armchair in the shape of an avocado." The results are surreal, playful, and deeply unsettling to artists and illustrato…

2020

GPT-3 and the Scaling Hypothesis

OpenAI releases GPT-3 — 175 billion parameters, trained on hundreds of billions of tokens. The model itself is impressive, but the paper that accompanies it is the real bombshell: capability emerges f…

2020

AlphaFold Solves Protein Folding

DeepMind's AlphaFold solves protein structure prediction — a 50-year grand challenge in biology — with accuracy rivaling experimental methods. It predicts the 3D shapes of nearly every known protein, …

2017

Transformer Architecture

A team at Google publishes "Attention Is All You Need" — eight pages that quietly reshape the entire field. The Transformer architecture replaces sequential processing with self-attention, allowing mo…

2016

AlphaGo Defeats Lee Sedol

DeepMind's AlphaGo defeats world Go champion Lee Sedol 4-1, conquering a game with more possible positions than atoms in the universe. Move 37 of Game 2 becomes legendary — a play so unconventional th…

2014

GANs Introduced

Ian Goodfellow, reportedly inspired by a conversation at a bar, invents Generative Adversarial Networks — two neural networks locked in a creative duel. One generates fake images; the other tries to s…

2012

AlexNet Wins ImageNet

A deep convolutional neural network called AlexNet crushes the ImageNet image recognition competition, cutting the error rate nearly in half. The secret ingredients: massive GPU computing, millions of…

1997

Deep Blue Defeats Kasparov

IBM's Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match, and the world holds its breath. It's not just a chess victory — it's the first time a machine publicly humbles human ex…

1986

Backpropagation Popularized

David Rumelhart, Geoffrey Hinton, and Ronald Williams publish 'Learning representations by back-propagating errors' in Nature. The algorithm itself isn't new, but the paper finally shows it can train …

1966

ELIZA Chatbot

Joseph Weizenbaum creates ELIZA at MIT — a simple pattern-matching program that simulates a Rogerian therapist. It has no understanding whatsoever. Yet people pour their hearts out to it, forming emot…

1956

Dartmouth Conference

A small group of mathematicians and engineers gather at Dartmouth College for a summer workshop, armed with an audacious premise: "every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in …

1950

Turing Test Proposed

Alan Turing publishes "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," flipping the script on philosophy with a single question: can machines think? Rather than defining intelligence, he proposes an imitation …