The Rise Of AI: A Brief History Of Artificial Intelligence

The Robots Are Coming!

From chatbots to self-driving cars, artificial intelligence is transforming our lives. But how did we get here?

The story starts over 70 years ago with a British mathematician named Alan Turing...

In 1950, Turing published a revolutionary paper called "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." In it, he proposed "the imitation game"—now known as the Turing Test—to assess if a machine could exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from a human. This set the stage for the dawn of AI.

In the decades after Turing's paper, progress accelerated. By the 1960s, AI programs could prove complex theorems in logic and geometry. Joseph Weizenbaum's 1966 ELIZA program could even mimic a psychotherapist through natural language conversations. However, by the 1970s, limitations in computing power led to an "AI winter" where funding and interest in AI shriveled.

Today, the AI sector is blazing hot once again. Why? Computing power has soared—an AI algorithm that took 3 hours to train in 2012 now takes only 10 minutes! Plus, the amount of training data available to "teach" AI systems has exploded through images, videos, and text on the internet. In 2012, AI startups attracted $282 million in funding. By 2017, this had skyrocketed to $17.9 billion!

Now AI systems are moving beyond niche research applications into everyday life. IBM's Watson trounced the Jeopardy champions in 2011. In 2016, Google's DeepMind AI beat a human world champion at the complex board game Go. And robot Sophia became a Saudi Arabian citizen in 2017!

ChatGPT: AI goes mainstream

The pace of progress continued to accelerate into the 2020s. In 2022, OpenAI unveiled DALL-E for generating images from text and ChatGPT for natural language conversations. These new AI systems displayed an unprecedented ability to understand context and human intent.

ChatGPT can chat about virtually any topic, having consumed vast amounts of text during its training. And it's mistake-free! Unlike earlier AIs, the updated ChatGPT refuses to make up facts. This marks a major milestone in responsible AI development.

Now we also have the very capable Google Bard, which is free and universal, just like all of their core products. We can now create and review code, search using images, and do a whole lot more with the new-age AI of 2023.

The future looks bright with Amazon, Meta, and Apple announcing their own AI tools. However, we must ensure AI is developed responsibly. It presents risks like job losses and must not be used for lethal autonomous weapons.

The story of AI is still unfolding, and WE get to write the next chapter.

Is AI helping you enhance your personal or professional landscape? How so?

Vikram Arora