AI Timeline

1950 — 2026

16 milestones
Interactive History

The History of
Artificial Intelligence

Click any milestone to explore quotes, visuals, and animated scenes from each era.

50
1950s

The Birth of AI

1950
Turing Test

Alan Turing proposes the Imitation Game to determine if machines can think.

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1956
Dartmouth Conference

John McCarthy coins "Artificial Intelligence" at the seminal summer workshop.

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60
1960s

Symbolic AI & Early Agents

1966
ELIZA Chatbot

Joseph Weizenbaum creates the first chatbot simulating a psychotherapist.

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1969
Shakey the Robot

First general-purpose mobile robot capable of reasoning about its actions.

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70
1970s

First AI Winter

1973
Lighthill Report

UK report triggers massive cuts in AI funding. The first AI Winter begins.

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1975
MYCIN Expert System

Rule-based system for diagnosing bacterial infections. Early success in expert systems.

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80
1980s

Expert Systems & Neural Revival

1986
Backpropagation

Rumelhart, Hinton & Williams popularize backprop. Neural networks gain traction again.

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1989
LeNet & CNNs

Yann LeCun develops convolutional networks for handwritten digit recognition.

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90
1990s

AI Enters the Mainstream

1997
Deep Blue vs Kasparov

IBM's Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match.

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1999
Sony AIBO

Sony releases AIBO, the first consumer entertainment robot dog.

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00
2000s

Machine Learning Renaissance

2006
Deep Belief Networks

Geoffrey Hinton revives deep learning with efficient training of deep neural nets.

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2009
ImageNet Dataset

Fei-Fei Li launches ImageNet, fueling the deep learning revolution in computer vision.

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10
2010s

Deep Learning Revolution

2012
AlexNet Wins ImageNet

Alex Krizhevsky's CNN dramatically outperforms rivals, igniting the modern deep learning era.

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2016
AlphaGo Defeats Lee Sedol

DeepMind's AlphaGo beats one of the world's best Go players in a historic 4-1 series.

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20
2020s

Generative AI & Agents

2022
ChatGPT Launch

OpenAI releases ChatGPT, bringing powerful generative AI to hundreds of millions worldwide.

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2023–2026
Foundation Models & Agents

GPT-4, multimodal models, reasoning engines, and autonomous AI agents reshape every industry.

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