What Is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

The idea of “a machine that thinks” dates back to ancient Greece. But since the advent of electronic computing (and relative to some of the topics discussed in this article) important events and milestones in the evolution of AI include the following:

 

1950

Alan Turing publishes Computing Machinery and Intelligence (link resides outside ibm.com). In this paper, Turing—famous for breaking the German ENIGMA code during WWII and often referred to as the “father of computer science”—asks the following question: “Can machines think?” 

From there, he offers a test, now famously known as the “Turing Test,” where a human interrogator would try to distinguish between a computer and human text response. While this test has undergone much scrutiny since it was published, it remains an important part of the history of AI, and an ongoing concept within philosophy as it uses ideas around linguistics. 

 

1956

John McCarthy coins the term “artificial intelligence” at the first-ever AI conference at Dartmouth College. (McCarthy went on to invent the Lisp language.) Later that year, Allen Newell, J.C. Shaw and Herbert Simon create the Logic Theorist, the first-ever running AI computer program.

 

1967

Frank Rosenblatt builds the Mark 1 Perceptron, the first computer based on a neural network that “learned” through trial and error. Just a year later, Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert publish a book titled Perceptrons, which becomes both the landmark work on neural networks and, at least for a while, an argument against future neural network research initiatives. 

 

1980

Neural networks, which use a backpropagation algorithm to train itself, became widely used in AI applications.

 

1995

Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig publish Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (link resides outside ibm.com), which becomes one of the leading textbooks in the study of AI. In it, they delve into four potential goals or definitions of AI, which differentiates computer systems based on rationality and thinking versus acting. 

 

1997

IBM’s Deep Blue beats then world chess champion Garry Kasparov, in a chess match (and rematch).

 

2004

John McCarthy writes a paper, What Is Artificial Intelligence? (link resides outside ibm.com), and proposes an often-cited definition of AI. By this time, the era of big data and cloud computing is underway, enabling organizations to manage ever-larger data estates, which will one day be used to train AI models. 

 

2011

IBM Watson® beats champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter at Jeopardy! Also, around this time, data science begins to emerge as a popular discipline.

 

2015

Baidu’s Minwa supercomputer uses a special deep neural network called a convolutional neural network to identify and categorize images with a higher rate of accuracy than the average human. 

 

2016

DeepMind’s AlphaGo program, powered by a deep neural network, beats Lee Sodol, the world champion Go player, in a five-game match. The victory is significant given the huge number of possible moves as the game progresses (over 14.5 trillion after just four moves). Later, Google purchased DeepMind for a reported USD 400 million.

 

2022

A rise in large language models or LLMs, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, creates an enormous change in performance of AI and its potential to drive enterprise value. With these new generative AI practices, deep-learning models can be pretrained on large amounts of data.

 

2024

The latest AI trends point to a continuing AI renaissance. Multimodal models that can take multiple types of data as input are providing richer, more robust experiences. These models bring together computer vision image recognition and NLP speech recognition capabilities. Smaller models are also making strides in an age of diminishing returns with massive models with large parameter counts.