AI technologies have made our lives easier. Today, we can effortlessly perform much more complicated tasks like generating realistic images and videos, flying planes with autopilot, and even creating websites with just a few clicks. But AI wasn’t as capable as it is today since its birth.
AI began development in the early 1900s through science fiction and theoretical works. The field officially started in the 1950s when Alan Turing published his groundbreaking paper on machine intelligence. The term "artificial intelligence" was first used in 1956 at Dartmouth College, leading to major breakthroughs in the 1950s that established AI as a scientific discipline.
That said, this article will walk you through the history of AI.
You’ll know how AI was born and matured and how it continues its journey to the future. Hence, let’s get straight into the topic.
History of Artificial Intelligence: A Detailed Timeline of This Awe-inspiring Technology
Do you know what our first technology was? It was stone tools that initiated the beginning of the stone age. Later, we got the base of all technology - electricity.
Over time, technology evolved, and we entered the era of computers. Humankind received great benefits from these machines. After computers, the greatest invention was AI, which shaped our modern technology and lives.
But when was AI invented? We’ll learn about it in the next section of this article.
When Was AI First Invented?
During the first half of the 20th century, some visionary film directors and writers introduced the concept of artificial intelligence through their work. We first learned about it from Fritz Lang's film Metropolis (1927).
Then, in 1939, it again appeared before our eyes in the form of a “Tin Man” in an American musical fantasy film, The Wizard of Oz. Later, a generation of scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians took the concept of artificial intelligence seriously.
Among them, Alan Turing, a young British polymath, was a notable one. He considered the mathematical possibility of artificial intelligence and published his work in 1950 in his paper - Computer Machinery and Intelligence.
That’s when we first came to know about the coined term - artificial intelligence. After 1950, we learned about the father of AI - John McCarthy. We’ll know more about him later in this article.
Laying the Foundation of AI: 1900-1950s
You already know how the media influenced some great minds to consider the idea of artificial intelligence in the early 1900s. Let’s glance through the timeline below to understand the foundation of AI better.
1921: In this year, the idea of artificial people was first introduced in a science fiction play, “Rossum’s Universal Robot,” released by Czech playwright Karel Čapek.
1929: A Japanese professor, Makoto Nishimura, produced the first Japanese robot titled Gakutensoku in this year.
1949: At this time, an American computer scientist, Edmund Callis Berkley, released a book, “Giant Brains, or Machines that Think.” This book featured the newer models of computers to human brains.
So, this is how these people, with their work, laid the foundation of artificial intelligence between 1921 and 1949.
The Birth of Artificial Intelligence (AI): 1950-1956
Artificial intelligence (AI) was invented between 1950-1956. It started in 1950 when Alan Turing published "Computer Machinery and Intelligence" and introduced the concept of machine intelligence through The Imitation Game. It was officially created in 1956 during the Dartmouth Conference, where John McCarthy coined the term "AI." This event marked the beginning of AI as a distinct field.
Key milestones include:
1950: Alan Turing published his book “Computer Machinery and Intelligence” and proposed a test of machine intelligence and called it The Imitation Game (now known as the Turing Test). He was the first person who seriously considered artificial intelligence and started working towards it to make it happen.
1952: Arthur Samuel, a computer scientist, created a computer checkers game as the first self-learning program.
1956: John McCarthy organized a workshop on artificial intelligence at Dartmouth. This was the first use of the word "artificial intelligence (AI)" and was recognized as the official birth of AI as a field.
The Juvenile Phase of AI: 1957-1979
After the phrase “artificial intelligence” was created, AI became a widespread idea starting in 1957. Then, AI received its first programming language and learned to play chess. AI was slowly entering its juvenile phase in the 1970s.
That stated, we’ll discuss more about AI’s growth journey in the timeline below. Let’s begin.
1958: In 1958, John McCarthy created the first programming language, LISP (an acronym for List Processing), for AI research. This programming language is still popular today.
1959: In this year, the term “machine learning” was first introduced by Arthur Samuel. He used this term while giving a speech on teaching machines to play chess better than humans.
1961: This year, AI went a bit further than just playing chess. It tackled challenging industrial tasks such as transporting welding parts and die casings in cars. Unimate, the first industrial robot, was the one to accomplish these seemingly dangerous jobs.
1965: In 1965, AI actually learned to think and make decisions like humans! This was possible with the help of Edward Feigenbaum and Joshua Lederberg, who jointly created the first “expert system,” giving AI thinking and decision-making abilities.
1966: After gaining thinking abilities, AI learned to chat with humans this year. And the credit for that goes to Joseph Weizenbaum who built the first “chatterbot” (later modified to chatbot), Eliza, a mock psychotherapist. This AI utilized natural language processing (NLP) to converse with us.
1968: Have you heard the phrase “Deep Learning”? Soviet mathematician Alexey Ivakhnenko first presented the idea in 1968 when he published his paper, "Group Method of Data Handling," in the journal "Avtomatika." The unique technique of AI that Alexey described in his publication is now known as "Deep Learning."
1973: In a report to the British Science Council, applied mathematician James Lighthill highlighted that the progress made in AI research was less significant than experts had predicted. This resulted in a significant decrease in government funding and support for AI research.
1979: In 1961, James L. Adams constructed the Stanford Cart, the first example of an autonomous vehicle. In 1971, this cart successfully traveled a chair-filled room without human interference.
In 1979, another big thing happened in the field of AI. This year, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), formerly known as the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, emerged.
The Emergence of AI: 1980-1987
Breakthroughs in research, government funding, and different deep-learning techniques are some of the remarkable events that occurred in the field of AI in the 1980s. Let’s take a deep dive into how AI was fine-tuned during this time frame.
1980: After the establishment of AAAI (the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence), its first conference was held at Stanford this year.
Besides this, the first expert system entered the commercial market with the tag XCON (expert configurer). This system was able to automatically pick components according to customers’ preferences.
1981: The Japanese government granted $850 million to the Fifth Generation Computer project in 1981 to create computers capable of translating, conversing in human language, and expressing reasoning on a human level.
1984: This year, the AAAI warned about the upcoming AI Winter, stating that interest in and funding for AI research would decrease significantly.
1985: The AAAI introduced an autonomous drawing program titled AARON through a conference.
1986: This year, the world first saw a driverless car (robot car). Ernst Dickmann and his team at Bundeswehr University of Munich created such a car. Without a human driver, this car could go up to 55 mph on obstacle-free roads.
1987: The first strategy managerial advisory system named Alacrity was launched by Alctrious Inc. this year.
The Wind of Winter in AI: 1987-1993
The AI Winter occurred between 1987 and 1993. The AAAI had already warned about it, analyzing the public, private, and government interest in AI research. It happened due to some setbacks in the machine market and expert systems.
We’ll learn in detail about these problems in the timeline below.
1987: Many specialized LISP companies failed to operate due to the market collapse for specialized LISP-based hardware. It occurred because of the emergence of more accessible and cheaper competitors who could run LISP software, especially those provided by Apple and IBM.
1988: Rollo Carpenter, a British AI scientist, invented Jabberwacky, a chatbot, this year. This chatbot was capable of having interesting and entertaining conversations with humans.
AI Agents: 1993-2011
AI underwent the AI Winter during the 80s, but it showed some excellent strides toward the development of AI research in the 90s. We’ll now walk you through how AI overcame challenges and started booming again during this time.
1997: This year, an artificial intelligence program, Deep Blue (built by IBM), won a chess match against the reigning world champion. It was the first time a computer system beat a human in a chess competition.
Another great event occurred this year. For the first time, AI could recognize voice, thanks to Dragon Systems, which developed Dragon Naturally Speaking software.
2000: It’s the year when AI learned to recognize and stimulate human emotions! AI just took a step further to become the “Terminator (a classic film character portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger).” Professor Cynthia Breazeal built this robot and called it Kismet.
2002: This year, AI started tackling household chores, such as cleaning debris. Roomba, a robotic vacuum cleaner, was introduced in 2002.
2004: NASA sent two rovers to Mars, and those rovers traveled the surface of Mars without human intervention!
2006: Big tech companies like X (formerly Twitter), Meta (formerly Facebook), and Netflix started to utilize the power of AI for UX algorithms and advertisements.
2010: This year, Microsoft released the first gaming hardware, the Xbox 360 Kinect, which could track human body movement with the help of AI and translate that into gaming directions.
2011: Apple launched its revolutionary virtual assistant Siri. Besides this, Watson, an NLP computer, beat two former champions in a televised game and won Jeopardy this year.
History of AI Technology: 2012-2019
Okay, we’ve seen how AI emerged. In this section, precisely timeline, we’ll discuss the developments of modern AI. So, let’s begin.
2012: Until 2012, AI could play chess, complete some challenging jobs, and recognize voice and body movements. This year, the AI learned to detect cats from their unlabeled images without background information.
It became possible because of two Google researchers, Jeff Dean and Andrew Ng. They trained a neural network to help AI gain this ability.
2015: In 2015, AI encountered an obstacle that hindered its progress. Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, and 3,000 others signed an open letter to the world’s government systems to ban the development of autonomous weapons.
2016: This is the time when a robot could actually see and replicate human-like emotions. And the credit for that goes to Hanson Robotics, which discovered a humanoid robot and called it Sophia.
2017: Meta (formerly Facebook) created two AI chatbots to converse and learn how to negotiate. But these bots learned to lie and didn’t deliver promising results.
2018: AI has become smarter since this year. Alibaba’s language-processing AI surpassed human intellect on a Standard reading and comprehension test.
2019: In the video game StarCraft 2, Google's AlphaStar outperformed all human players with the exception of.2% and attained Grandmaster.
AI Surge: 2020-Present
AI is now growing and slowly becoming stronger, featuring new abilities with time. In this section, we’ll discuss the history of Open AI and the timeline of AI’s resurgence.
2020: OpenAI began to test GPT-3, which used Deep Learning to write code, poetry, and complete other creative writing tasks. It was also the launching year for Dorik AI, a no-code AI website builder.
2021: This year, OpenAI created DALL-E, which could generate images from written instructions (prompts).
2022: In 2022, OpenAI introduced an AI chatbot, ChatGPT. It was the most advanced chatbot humans had ever seen. It could help people write code, essays, articles, books, journals, and emails and easily accomplish other writing jobs.
2023: At this time, OpenAI released GPT-4, and Google released Gemini (formerly Bard). These AI applications could then generate far more nuanced and creative responses. They were capable of completing a diverse array of challenging tasks.
2024: This is the time when AI takes a giant leap toward its future. Until 2024, AI could recognize voices and human body movements, create human-like responses, clear bar exams, generate images, and perform other impressive tasks.
But now, it can generate videos from texts! It can clone human voices, sing, and create animation. In the coming days, this revolutionary application can do much more, which we struggle to do or dream to accomplish.
Let’s now take a look at how far AI has reached in 2024.
January: In January 2024, several AI advancements and releases took place. Chat GPT announced its GPT Store launch back in late November 2023.
Finally, it sees the light on January 10, 2024. This store allows users to share their custom chatbots, and soon, users can monetize these bots and make money with the GPT Store.
Alongside this, another significant AI development took place in January. A robotic sensor developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge can read braille at twice the speed of humans.
February: Chat GPT makers announce their new project, Sora - a text-to-video generator. This month, Google rebranded its flagship language tool, Bard, to Gemini.
March: This month, Anthropic introduced Claude 3, a new series of AI models designed to compete directly with OpenAI's GPT models. According to the Business Insider report, GPT-5 will be released soon this year.
In March, Elon Musk’s company, xAI, launched the base model weights and network architecture of Grok-1, a large language model and a potential contender of OpenAI’s GPT models. Lastly, on March 12, 2024, Cognition Labs introduced the world’s first AI Software Engineer - Devin.
April: Meta released the upcoming version of their flagship large language model, Llama 3. Nvidia revealed the Blackwell B200 tensor core chip this month. It’s Nvidia’s most powerful GPU, capable of reducing AI operational costs and energy consumption by up to 25 times compared to the H100.
May: OpenAI introduced a new model, GPT-4o, and a desktop version of ChatGPT this month. Apple has announced its latest iPad chips, enabling new AI features.
Among them is an AI-powered eye-tracking feature that allows users with physical disabilities to control their devices using just their eyes.
Google announced a text-to-video AI model titled Veo this month. It can be a worthy contender for OpenAI’s Sora.
June: US-based chipmaker Qualcomm and American companies Intel and AMD announced new consumer products at the B2B technology trade show, Computex Taipei 2024.
Intel introduced the Lunar Lake chips, while AMD revealed the Ryzen AI 300 chips. Both are designed to bring onboard AI capabilities to Windows PCs. Besides this, Apple disclosed Apple Intelligence for iPhone, iPad, and Mac this month.
July: This month, OpenAI released GPT-4o mini, a cost-efficient yet powerful AI model capable of handling various tasks. Alongside this, OpenAI introduced SearchGPT this month as well.
Mistral AI and NVIDIA jointly launched Mistral NeMo 12B on July 18, 2024. It’s a powerful AI model designed for various advanced applications, such as generating human-like text, translating text between multiple languages, etc.
August: In August, ByteDance introduced its AI video app, Jimeng AI, enabling users to create videos from text prompts. Additionally, OpenAI and Anthropic have secured agreements with the US government to research, test, and evaluate their AI models.
This August, Google announced the Google Pixel Buds Pro 2, which will utilize Gemini to provide industry-leading audio performance and improve noise cancellation.
FAQs on the History of AI
Who is the Founder of AI?
There isn’t one founder of AI, even though John McCarthy is considered the father of AI. Along with him, Alan Turing, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, and Herbert A. Simon are some great people who worked behind the birth of AI.
How is AI Created?
AI is created using Machine Learning, a branch of AI and computer science that prioritizes using data and algorithms to allow AI to learn the way humans learn and gradually improve their accuracy.
Why is AI Alarming?
AI is alarming due to several factors, including consumer privacy, unclear legal regulation, and biased programming. However, AI will be a blessing if we can consider all these factors and take the necessary actions to control it.
Will AI Over Take Humans?
The straightforward answer to this question is NO. AI won’t take over humans, at least not in the way movies depicted AI.
How Will AI Change the World by 2030?
AI will be more powerful by 2030. It will help humans in the research and development of new drugs to cure many diseases that are incurable today. Besides this, AI will be a great teaching assistant, teaching children on varying academic and general topics.
What’s Next in the Industry of AI?
Okay, enough of the history of AI. It’s time to discuss the future of the AI industry. Nonetheless, we can’t entirely predict what exactly will take place in the coming days in the field of AI.
Instead, we can discuss what many leading experts in this arena think about AI's future. According to their thoughts, AI will create more business opportunities while eliminating some workforces.
For example, OpenAI’s Sora will impact video editors and production studios. Thanks to this AI, video creation and editing won’t take much time or cost much money. Like Sora, many other AIs will rise in the future and make our jobs much easier.
That’s all we can say about the future of AI.
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