AI Anatomy Class · Part 0 · ChatGPT, who are you?

3. 70 years of AI on a timeline

Q. Did AI suddenly appear out of nowhere along with ChatGPT?

1. AI didn't appear out of nowhere. Its story goes back more than 70 years. In 1950, Alan Turing asked, "Can machines think?"
2. In 1956, "artificial intelligence" got its name. In 1958 came the perceptron, a machine that could learn by itself.
3. But perceptrons failed at simple problems, hopes faded, and research froze. That's called an "AI winter". Rule-based AI took over.
4. In 1986, backpropagation spread, but another winter came. In 1997, Deep Blue beat the chess champion with rules and raw computing.
5. In 2012, a neural network crushed a photo-recognition contest and the deep learning era began. In 2016, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol.
6. In 2017, a Google team published the transformer, the T in GPT. GPT-1 came in 2018, then GPT-3 in 2020, with 175 billion numbers.
7. Then, on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT arrived. A million people used it within five days. Let's open up this machine, piece by piece.

Chapter summary

• A story of more than 70 years, starting with Turing's question in 1950.
• Hope and disappointment (AI winters) took turns, until deep learning leaped ahead in 2012.
• 2017 transformer → GPT → 2022 ChatGPT.