Eras of Artificial Intelligence

Trace the evolution of AI across 8 distinct eras, from medieval automata and mathematical foundations through the booms, winters, and breakthroughs that brought us to the age of deep learning.

01
Dawn of AI

The 1956 Dartmouth workshop gave the field its name and its outsized ambitions. Early programs like the Logic Theorist, ELIZA, and Shakey...

1956–1969 11 milestones
02
Deep Learning Revolution

AlexNet’s 2012 ImageNet victory ignited an explosion in deep learning, powered by GPUs and massive datasets. DeepMind’s AlphaGo stunned the world by...

2011–2019 15 milestones
03
Expert Systems Boom

Corporate America embraced rule-based expert systems like R1/XCON and MYCIN, and Japan launched its ambitious Fifth Generation Computer project. The industry boomed...

1980–1992 16 milestones
04
First AI Winter

The 1973 Lighthill Report savaged AI research in Britain, and DARPA slashed funding in the United States after promised breakthroughs failed to...

1970–1979 6 milestones
05
Foundation Models

GPT-3’s arrival in 2020 demonstrated that scaling language models produced emergent, surprising capabilities, and ChatGPT’s 2022 launch brought AI into mainstream daily...

2020–Present 3 milestones
06
Mechanical Minds

From Ramon Llull’s logic machines to Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, thinkers imagined devices that could reason. Philosophers and inventors laid the conceptual...

1308–1842 1 milestones
07
Statistical Learning

AI shed its grand ambitions and rebranded around practical results — spam filters, recommendation engines, and search ranking. IBM’s Deep Blue defeated...

1993–2010 14 milestones
08
Theoretical Foundations

Ada Lovelace speculated on machine intelligence, Alan Turing formalized computation and proposed his famous test, and Claude Shannon built the bridges between...

1843–1955 9 milestones