5000 BC–1942 · 1 key events
Prehistory
Myths of automatons, mechanical calculators, formal logic and the theory of computation.
1943–1956 · 7 key events
Birth of a field
Artificial neurons, the imitation game and the Dartmouth proposal give the field its questions and its name.
1956–1972 · 14 key events
Golden years
Early programs solve puzzles, prove theorems and hold simple conversations; expectations run high.
1958
1966
1969
1980–1986 · 8 key events
Expert systems
Rule-based systems reach industry and national programmes fund new work.
1982
1987–1992 · 13 key events
Second AI winter
The specialised hardware market collapses and interest fades again.
1988
1990
1992
1993–2011 · 89 key events
Statistical learning
Machine learning, larger datasets and the web change how systems are built.
1997
2004
2012–2017 · 95 key events
Deep learning
Neural networks trained on GPUs take the lead in vision, speech and games.
2012
2014
2015
2017–2022 · 154 key events
Large models
The Transformer and pre-training at scale lead to large language models.
2017
2018
2019
2022–Present · 883 key events
Generative AI for everyone
Chat assistants reach the public; open models, agents and embodied AI follow.
