A POCKET HISTORY OF AI

SEVENTY YEARS OF HIGHS AND LOWS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF MACHINE LEARNING

1950

THE IMITATION GAME

Alan Turing introduces the Turing Test, which challenges a machine’s ability to display intelligent behavior indistinguishable from a human’s.

1956

THE BEGINNING OF AI The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence popularizes the term.

1963

COLD WAR CONCERNS U.S. government agencies like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) fund AI research at universities such as MIT, hoping for machines that will translate Russian instantly.

1968

“I’M SORRY, DAVE. I’M AFRAID I CAN’T DO THAT.” 2001: A Space Odyssey is released, featuring the autonomous and lethal

AI, HAL 9000.

1974

THE WINTER OF AI

With disappointingly small yields from AI investments, governments around the world pull back on funding and research. The winter lasts two decades, with just a few heat waves of progress.

1984 COMMON-SENSE AI

Douglas Lenat sets out to construct an AI that can do commonsense reasoning. He develops it for 30 years before it is used commercially.

1997

CHECKMATE

IBM’S Deep Blue beats world champion Garry Kasparov in chess.

2000

“THE IDEAL SEARCH ENGINE IS SMART.”

Larry Page discusses directing Google Search toward AI.

2011

HEY, SIRI

Apple introduces Siri after acquiring the technology from Stanford Research Institute the year before.

2012

CATCHING CATS

A Google neural network trains itself to recognize cats and humans by viewing millions of images from Youtube, detecting cats with 74.8% accuracy and faces with 81.7%.

2014

GAME OVER

Stephen Hawking says, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

2015

AI FOR EVERYONE Google releases Tensorflow, an opensource platform for machine learning.

2017

AI FIRST

Sundar Pichai announces that Google is shifting from a “mobile-first world to an Ai-first world.”

2018

BACKLASH

Amid record funding for AI startups, Google is criticized for selling AI to the Pentagon, and Amazon faces scrutiny for how police departments use its facial-recognition AI.

2019

“THE WRITING IS ON

THE WALL.”

The head of Google’s quantum team presents its growth rate, which suggests that quantum supremacy is nigh.