THE ENCYCLOPEDIA / 2 MIN READ
Timeline of Artificial Intelligence
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A compact chronological index of major AI milestones. For narrative depth, see History.
1950s
- 1950 — Alan Turing publishes Computing Machinery and Intelligence; introduces the Turing test.
- 1956 — Dartmouth Workshop coins the term “artificial intelligence.”
- 1956 — Logic Theorist (Newell & Simon) proves theorems via search.
- 1958 — McCarthy creates Lisp; Rosenblatt develops the Perceptron.
1960s–1970s
- 1966 — ELIZA (Weizenbaum) simulates conversation; Shakey robot begins autonomous planning.
- 1969 — Perceptrons (Minsky & Papert) analyzes perceptron limits.
- 1975 — MYCIN expert system for medical diagnosis.
1980s
- 1986 — Rumelhart, Hinton & Williams publish backpropagation for multilayer networks.
- 1987 — LISP machine market crash contributes to an AI winter.
1990s–2000s
- 1997 — Deep Blue defeats Kasparov at chess.
- 2006 — Hinton et al. demonstrate deep belief networks.
- 2011 — IBM Watson beats humans on Jeopardy!.
2010s
- 2012 — AlexNet wins ImageNet, igniting the deep-learning era.
- 2015 — TensorFlow released.
- 2016 — AlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol; PyTorch released.
- 2017 — Transformer paper (“Attention Is All You Need”).
2020s
- 2020 — GPT-3 demonstrates few-shot capabilities at scale.
- 2022 — ChatGPT launches, catalyzing public adoption of LLMs.
- 2023 — Bletchley Summit on frontier AI safety.
- 2024 — EU AI Act adopted; multimodal and agentic systems advance rapidly.
Recurring Themes
- Cycles of hype and winter.
- Shifts between symbolic and statistical paradigms.
- Growth driven by compute, data, and scale.