AI Timeline

Foundational Era (1940s–1960s)

• 1943: Warren McCulloch & Walter Pitts publish "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity," launching neural network theory.
• 1949: Donald Hebb proposes the Hebbian learning theory ("Cells that fire together wire together").
• 1950: Alan Turing proposes the "Turing Test" to measure machine intelligence and publishes "Computing Machinery and Intelligence".
• 1956: The Dartmouth Conference, organized by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon, coins the term Artificial Intelligence. This event is seen as the birth of AI as a field.
• 1958: John McCarthy invents the LISP programming language, a staple for AI research.

Early Innovations and Industrial AI (1960s–1980s)

• 1961: Unimate, created by George Devol, becomes the first industrial robot and is deployed at a General Motors factory.
• 1964–1966: Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT develops ELIZA, the first chatbot simulating conversation.
• 1972: Shakey the Robot, from SRI International, is the first general-purpose mobile robot. Stanford's MYCIN system diagnoses bacterial infections.
• 1980: The first AAAI (Association for the Advancement of AI) conference is held at Stanford.
• 1981–1986: Major expert systems and AI projects rise, including IBM, Symbolics, and the Japanese Fifth Generation Computer Project.
• 1986: Ernst Dickmanns creates the first driverless car prototype in Germany.

AI Winter and Revival (Late 1980s–1990s)

• 1984–1993: AI Winter: Funding and public interest drop due to overpromising and underdelivering.
• 1995: Richard Wallace develops ALICE, a foundational chatbot.
• 1997: IBM's Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov, a historic moment for machine learning.
• 1998: Cynthia Breazeal develops emotionally expressive robot Kismet.

Rise of Machine Learning and Big Tech (2000s–2010s)

• 2002: Debut of the Roomba robot vacuum, demonstrating AI in consumer products.
• 2006: Geoffrey Hinton revives deep neural networks, sparking today's AI boom; large companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft start investing heavily in AI.
• 2011: IBM's Watson defeats top human champions on Jeopardy!.
• 2012: Google's Jeff Dean and Andrew Ng train a deep neural network to recognize cats without human labels, proving the power of deep learning.
• 2014: Amazon launches Alexa, a voice assistant; Facebook launches FAIR (Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research).
• 2015: Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, and others sign an open letter warning against AI-powered autonomous weapon systems.

The OpenAI Revolution (2015)

December 2015: The founding of OpenAI marked a pivotal moment in artificial intelligence, driven by the aim to ensure safe, responsible, and broadly beneficial development of AI.

Founders and Vision

OpenAI was established as a non-profit research organization by prominent entrepreneurs and researchers:

• Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX)
• Sam Altman (Y Combinator president)
• Greg Brockman (former CTO of Stripe)
• Ilya Sutskever (leading deep learning researcher, ex-Google Brain)
• John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, Andrej Karpathy, and others

With $1 billion+ in initial commitments from Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services, and others, OpenAI's mission was to ensure artificial general intelligence (AGI) would "benefit humanity as a whole."

Modern AI Breakthroughs (2015–2025)

• 2016: Google's DeepMind's AlphaGo defeats Go champion Lee Sedol; Sophia robot gains international fame.
• 2018–2019: Alibaba's language-processing AI and Google's AlphaStar beat human benchmarks in language and gaming.
• June 2020: OpenAI releases GPT-3, capable of advanced natural language generation and code creation.
• January 2021: OpenAI unveils DALL-E, an image-generating AI that advances machine understanding of visuals.
• August 2021: OpenAI releases Codex, powering GitHub Copilot.
• April–September 2022: DALL-E 2 launches and becomes publicly available.

The ChatGPT Moment (November 2022)

November 30, 2022: OpenAI launches ChatGPT, creating a watershed moment in AI history.

• Reaches 1 million users in 5 days
• Achieves 100 million users in 2 months — fastest-growing app in history
• Triggers global race for generative AI adoption
• Reshapes public and institutional perception of AI capabilities

The Modern LLM Era (2023–2025)

• March 2023: OpenAI releases GPT-4, a large multimodal model.
• March 2023: Stanford releases Alpaca-7B, sparking locally-runnable LLM revolution.
• September 2023: Mistral-7B launches as open source with strong coding abilities.
• 2024: Meta's Llama-3/3.1 (up to 405B parameters), Microsoft's Phi-3 family, and Alibaba's Qwen series enable powerful local AI.
• 2025: Advanced agentic tools like Cursor 2.0, Claude Code, Windsurf, and Aider integrate local LLMs for privacy-first development.

Key Pioneers & Figures

Leading AI Companies