# A short history of AI · AI in Bed

Beginner level · 6 min · https://www.aiinbed.com/learn/beginner/history-of-ai

*From a thought experiment in 1950 to chatbots in your pocket: the big moments, the long winters and why it all sped up.*

AI feels brand new, but people have been working on it for over seventy years. The story is not a straight line. It is a series of big hopes, long disappointments and a few sudden leaps.

### Where it began

In 1950 the mathematician Alan Turing asked a simple question: can machines think? He suggested a game instead of a definition. If a person chatting by text can't tell a machine from a human, perhaps that is good enough. We now call this the **Turing test**.

In 1956 a small group of researchers met for a summer workshop at Dartmouth College in the USA. The name "artificial intelligence" comes from their proposal, and many people treat that summer as the birth of the field.

Here are the big moments, in order:

- **1950:** Turing publishes "Computing Machinery and Intelligence".
- **1956:** The Dartmouth workshop gives the field its name.
- **1970s:** Early promises go unmet and funding dries up: the first **AI winter**.
- **1980s:** **Expert systems** boom: programs built from hand-written rules by human experts.
- **Late 1980s to early 1990s:** Expert systems prove costly and brittle. A second winter follows.
- **1997:** IBM's Deep Blue beats world chess champion Garry Kasparov.
- **2012:** A neural network called AlexNet wins the ImageNet image recognition contest by a wide margin. Deep learning takes off.
- **2016:** DeepMind's AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol, one of the world's best Go players.
- **2017:** Google researchers publish the **transformer**, the design behind today's chatbots.
- **2022:** OpenAI releases ChatGPT, and AI chat reaches the public almost overnight.

> An AI winter is a bit like a garden in January. Nothing much seems to grow, but researchers kept quietly planting ideas that bloomed decades later.

**Quick check:** What was an "AI winter"?

A. A season when computers ran too cold to work
B. A period when hype faded and funding and interest in AI dropped
C. The name of an early chess program
D. A winter school where AI was invented

Answer: B. When early promises weren't met, money and enthusiasm dried up for years. It happened twice before the modern boom.

### Rules versus learning

Expert systems tried to write intelligence down as rules: "if the patient has a fever and a rash, consider measles". This worked in narrow areas, but the real world has too many exceptions to list.

Modern AI flips the approach. Instead of writing rules, we show a system lots of examples and let it learn the patterns itself.

### Why it sped up after 2012

The ideas behind neural networks are decades old. What changed was three things arriving together: huge amounts of data from the internet, powerful graphics chips that could do the maths quickly, and better training methods.

**Quick check:** Which event in 2012 is often seen as the start of the deep learning boom?

A. Deep Blue beating Kasparov at chess
B. The release of ChatGPT
C. AlexNet winning the ImageNet contest
D. The Dartmouth workshop

Answer: C. AlexNet beat the other entries by a large margin, which convinced many researchers that deep neural networks were the way forward.

**Key takeaways**

- AI began as a research field in the 1950s, with Turing and the Dartmouth workshop.
- Hand-written rules hit their limits, leading to two AI winters.
- Data, fast chips and better methods made learning from examples work, from AlexNet to ChatGPT.

**Go deeper (free sources)**

- [History of artificial intelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence) by Wikipedia
- [The Turing Test](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/) by Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- [Attention Is All You Need](https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762) by Vaswani et al., 2017