1950
Turing frames the question
Alan Turing proposes the imitation game, giving computer intelligence a durable testable shape.
Concise timeline
The History of AI
A fast scan of the ideas, winters, breakthroughs, and products that turned artificial intelligence from theory into everyday infrastructure.
Selected milestones, simplified for a quick overview. Dates mark public research, systems, or product moments that changed the field's direction.
1956
AI gets its name
The Dartmouth workshop coins artificial intelligence and launches it as a formal research field.
1966
Conversation becomes visible
ELIZA shows how pattern matching can mimic dialogue, raising early questions about machine understanding.
1970s
Expert systems rise
Rule-based programs capture specialist knowledge, proving useful in narrow domains while exposing limits.
1980s
AI winters reset expectations
Funding cools as systems disappoint, but research continues in machine learning, robotics, and neural nets.
1997
Deep Blue beats Kasparov
IBM's chess victory becomes a public symbol of specialized machine reasoning at scale.
2012
Deep learning breaks through
AlexNet dramatically improves image recognition, accelerating GPU-driven neural network research.
2017
Transformers change the stack
The transformer architecture makes large-scale language and multimodal models far more capable.
2022
Generative AI goes mainstream
Text and image models bring AI into everyday work, search, coding, design, and customer operations.
2024+
Agents and multimodal systems expand
Models increasingly read, see, write code, use tools, and coordinate multi-step digital workflows.