AI: Understanding the What and Why

📚 Brief History of AI: The Milestones That Matter

The Foundation Era (1950s-1980s)

• 1950: Alan Turing creates the "Turing Test" to measure machine intelligence[1]
• 1956: The term "Artificial Intelligence" is coined at the Dartmouth Conference[2]
• 1958: Frank Rosenblatt develops the Perceptron, precursor to modern neural networks[3]
• 1980s: Expert systems emerge for business applications[4]

The Modern Era (1990s-2010s)

• 1997: IBM's Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov[5]
• 2006: Deep learning renaissance begins with Geoffrey Hinton's breakthrough research
• 2012: AlexNet wins ImageNet competition, proving deep learning's power[6]
• 2016: Google's AlphaGo defeats Go champion Lee Sedol[7]

The Generative AI Revolution (2017-Present)

• 2017: Transformer architecture invented at Google, enabling modern language models[8]
• 2020: GPT-3 demonstrates unprecedented language capabilities
• 2022: ChatGPT launches, bringing AI to mainstream users[9]
• 2025: GPT-5 and Claude Opus 4.1 push AI capabilities to new levels[10][11]

🤖 What is AI? Core Concepts

Understanding Artificial Intelligence

• What it is: AI systems that can perform tasks typically requiring human intelligence