1.2 History of AI

The idea of thinking machines is old, but AI as a research field began in the 1950s. In 1950 Alan Turing proposed the 'Turing test' to ask whether a machine could imitate human conversation. In 1956 the Dartmouth conference gave the field its name, 'Artificial Intelligence', and launched decades of research.

Progress was not smooth. Periods of great excitement were followed by 'AI winters' in the 1970s and late 1980s, when funding dried up because the technology could not meet the big promises. The recent boom since around 2012 came from three things together: huge datasets, faster computer chips (GPUs), and better learning algorithms.