Timeline
Key moments in AI, decade by decade, from the 1940s to now.
Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts publish a mathematical model of an artificial neuron, an early link between brains and computation.
Alan Turing publishes "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" and proposes the imitation game, now called the Turing test.
The Dartmouth workshop brings researchers together, and the term "artificial intelligence" is put forward by John McCarthy and colleagues.
Frank Rosenblatt demonstrates the perceptron, an early learning machine inspired by neurons.
Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA chatbot shows how a simple program can seem to hold a conversation.
1970s
Progress falls short of early promises and funding shrinks: the first "AI winter".
1980s
Expert systems, programs built on hand-written rules, bring a commercial boom, followed by a second slowdown.
David Rumelhart, Geoffrey Hinton and Ronald Williams publish work that popularises backpropagation for training neural networks.
IBM's Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a match.
AlexNet, a deep neural network, wins the ImageNet image recognition contest by a wide margin and launches the deep learning era.
DeepMind's AlphaGo defeats Go champion Lee Sedol, four games to one.
Researchers at Google publish "Attention Is All You Need", introducing the Transformer architecture.
OpenAI releases ChatGPT in November, bringing conversational AI to a mass audience.