🧠 AI Timeline: From Foundations to Now

📜 Pre-1950s: The Foundations

• 1854 – George Boole introduces Boolean logic, laying a foundation for digital computing.
• 1936 – Alan Turing proposes the concept of a Universal Machine (Turing Machine).
• 1943 – McCulloch & Pitts create the first concept of artificial neurons.

🧪 1950s: Birth of AI

• 1950 – Alan Turing introduces the Turing Test in “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”.
• 1956 – Dartmouth Conference: John McCarthy coins the term “Artificial Intelligence”.
• 1958 – John McCarthy develops LISP, a programming language for AI.

🧠 1960s: Early Exploration

• 1961 – First industrial robot Unimate is deployed in a General Motors factory.
• 1965 – Joseph Weizenbaum creates ELIZA, an early NLP chatbot.
• 1969 – Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert publish Perceptrons, highlighting limits of neural nets.

🧮 1970s: Expert Systems Rise

• 1972 – PROLOG, a logic programming language, is developed.
• 1974-1980 – AI Winter #1 due to overhyped promises and underwhelming results.
• 1979 – Stanford Cart, an early self-driving vehicle, navigates obstacles.

🛠 1980s: Revival with Expert Systems

• 1980 – Introduction of XCON, an expert system used by Digital Equipment Corporation.
• 1986 – Backpropagation popularized by Rumelhart et al., boosts neural network research.
• 1987-1993 – AI Winter #2 due to the collapse of expert system market.

📈 1990s: Statistical Learning & Milestones

• 1995 – Support Vector Machines (SVMs) gain popularity.
• 1997 – IBM’s Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov.

💻 2000s: Data and Machine Learning Era

• 2006 – Geoffrey Hinton reintroduces deep learning with Deep Belief Networks.
• 2009 – Google starts developing its self-driving car project.
• 2011 – IBM Watson defeats human champions on Jeopardy!.

🤖 2010s: AI Goes Mainstream

• 2012 – AlexNet wins ImageNet, reigniting deep learning.
• 2014 – Ian Goodfellow proposes GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks).
• 2015 – Elon Musk and others found OpenAI.
• 2016 – AlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol, a Go world champion.
• 2018 – BERT by Google changes the NLP landscape with transformers.

🌐 2020s: Generative AI & AI for All

• 2020 – OpenAI releases GPT-3, a 175B parameter language model.
• 2021 – DALL·E and CLIP introduced by OpenAI for image generation and understanding.
• 2022 – Stable Diffusion and Midjourney popularize open generative image models.
• 2022 – OpenAI launches ChatGPT, making LLMs accessible to the public.
• 2023 – GPT-4 is released, improving reasoning, creativity, and multimodal support.
• 2024 – Rise of AI Agents, Copilots, and multimodal systems.

🧭 The Future

• Towards AGI – Research into Artificial General Intelligence continues.
• AI + Quantum – Experiments in quantum machine learning gain traction.
• Ethical AI – Greater focus on responsible, explainable, and fair AI.