The History and Evolution of Artificial Intelligence:
Artificial Intelligence is a technology that allows machines to copy human intelligence. This type of machines can make decisions, learn anything, adapt easily, and perform tasks like humans. The history and evolution of AI spans many decades. This post gives a brief summary of key milestones throughout the years.
Foundation of AI
The early 1900s, particularly from 1900 to 1950, generated a lot of interest in the idea of artificial humans. This give rise to scientists to explore the usefulness of creating an artificial brain. However, specially building simpler robot versions. Some notable milestones from this period include −
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1921 | Czech playwright Karel Capek proposed the science fiction play "Rossum's Universal Robots", where he first introduced robots. |
| 1943 | Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts created the first conceptual model of a neural network. |
Exposure to AI
In between 1950-1956 marked as the turning point for AI. Companies & Researchers made the key milestones around this period are −
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1950 | Alan Turing published "Computer Machinery and Intelligence" which proposed Turing test to calculate the intelligence of a machine. |
| 1952 | Arthur Samuel a computer scientist, who developed a program which can play checkers, which can improved its performance through experience. |
AI Revolution
The years 1957 to 1973 are often referred to as the "Golden Age" because many researchers were eager to make significant progress in the field. Some key milestones during this time include −
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1957 | Frank Rosenblatt introduced the early innovations in artificial neural networks. |
| 1958 | LISP, first programming language for AI research developed by John McCarthy. |
| 1959 | Arthur Samuel coined the term "Machine Learning" and described it as computers that could outperform humans in various tasks. |
| 1966 | Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA, which utilized natural language processing to engage in conversations with people. |
| 1972 | Prolog programming language Introduced by Alain Colmerauer and Philippe Roussel. |
AI Winter
The first AI winter lasted from 1974 to 1980, known for a challenging period for AI development. During these years, there was a significant drop in research funding, leading to decreased interest in AI.
AI Boom
From 1980 to 1987, there was a surge in growth and interest in AI, driven by research breakthroughs and increased government funding for researchers. Key milestones in this era include −
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1980 | The first expert systems, known as XCON, were introduced to the market. |
| 1981 | The Japanese government allocated $850 million for the Fifth Generation Computer Project, aiming to create computers capable of translation, human-like conversation, and reasoning. |
| 1984 | The AAAI issued a warning about an impending AI Winter, predicting a significant decline in funding and interest that would negatively impact research. |
| 1986 | Ernst Dickmann and his team showcased the first self-driving cars, which could travel at 55 km/h without obstacles or a human driver. |
AI Stagnation
The second AI winter occurred from 1987 to 1993, as investors and the government withdrew funding due to high costs and lack of effective results.
AI Agents
Between 1993-2011, was a remarkable growth in AI, especially in the development of intelligent computer programs. during this period, professional focused on developing software to match with human intelligence for specific tasks. key milestones during this period are −
| Year | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|
| 1997 | Deep Blue was the first program to win against Gray Kasparov in chess championship. | |
| 2000 | Professor Cynthia Breazeal invented "Kismet" the first robot, that could replicate human emotions with facial features similar to humans. | |
| 2003 | Two rovers landed onto Mars by NASA, which navigated without human interference through the surface of the planet. | |
| 2006 | Twitter, Facebook, and Netflix started using AI as part of advertising, business analysis, and user engagement. | |
| 2011 | Apple released the first popular voice assistant "Siri". . |
Artificial General Intelligence
From 2011 to now, extend significant advancements within AI domain. Large data application can linked by these achievements, and the currently interest on artificial general intelligence(AGI). Some of the key milestones in this period are −
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2012 | Jeff Dean and Andrew Ng (Google researchers) instruct a neural network to recognize cats using images without any information or label. |
| 2016 | Hanson Robotics introduced Sophia, the first humanoid robot with realistic human features, emotion recognition, and communication abilities. |
| 2017 | Two AI Chatbots was programmed by Facebook, to communicate and that can learn to negotiate, but they started speaking their own language entirely on their own eventually and stopped using English |
| 2018 | Chinese Alibaba's language − processing AI won over human intellect on a Standford reading and comprehension test. |
| 2019 | Google's AlphaStar make it to Grandmaster on the video game StarCraft 2 surpass all but .2% of human players. |
| 2020 | OpenAI started beta testing GPT-3, it's an model that with the help of Deep Learning, can create content, code, and other creative tasks. |
| 2021 | DallE developed by OpenAI, which can generate images using the prompts in natural language. |
| 2022 | Dall-E was integrated with Chatgpt, showcasing AI's capacity to generate text and relevant images. |
| 2023 | Multimodal is another major milestone in AI. These models process all the data types like text, image, video, and audio all at once. |
| 2024 | Devin is the first under development AI software engineer and SORA is another innovation of OpenAI which is an text-to-video model. |
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