The big idea
📜
A 70-year journey
AI has moved in waves — bursts of optimism, “winters,” and breakthroughs — powered by better ideas, data, and hardware.
Artificial Intelligence · Lesson 2
The History of Artificial Intelligence
beginner⏱ 15 min · 8 cards
Milestones
From Turing to today
The moments that shaped modern AI.
Concept
Booms and winters
Early excitement in the 1950s–60s hit hard limits, causing funding “winters.”
Progress returned with machine learning in the 1990s–2000s, then exploded with deep learning after 2012.
Key term
Key moment
What caused the “AI winters”?
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AI winter
Periods when hype outran results, so funding and interest dried up — until new methods revived the field.
Nuance
Why it kept advancing
Maester Note
Three forces repeatedly drove progress: better algorithms, more data, and faster computing.
Recap
Key takeaways
- ✓Modern AI rests on decades of research, not a recent invention.
- ✓Overpromising, not technical failure, caused the AI winters.
- ✓Expert systems encoded rules by hand and were brittle and costly to maintain.
- ✓Data, hardware, and algorithms together enabled deep learning.
- ✓Transformers underpin recent generative AI progress.
Quick check
Which statement best describes artificial intelligence?
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