The term “Artificial Intelligence” was coined by John McCarthy in 1956, at a conference at Dartmouth College in the US. But the idea of thinking machines is older — British mathematician Alan Turing was discussing it in 1950. Modern AI has had dozens of “fathers” and “mothers” over 70 years.
1950 — Alan Turing plants the seed
English mathematician Alan Turing — the same one who helped crack the Nazi Enigma — published the paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” asking the foundational question: “Can machines think?”
He proposed the Turing Test: if a human converses with a machine and can’t distinguish it from a human, it can be considered intelligent. Seventy years later, we’re still debating this.
1956 — The conference that named AI
In July 1956, four scientists gathered at Dartmouth (US) for a 2-month workshop. They were:
- John McCarthy — who coined the term “Artificial Intelligence”
- Marvin Minsky — MIT, neural network pioneer
- Nathaniel Rochester — IBM
- Claude Shannon — father of information theory
This conference is officially considered the birth of the field. McCarthy also later created the LISP programming language, foundational to decades of AI.
1966 — ELIZA, the first chatbot
Joseph Weizenbaum, at MIT, created ELIZA — a program that simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist. It just reformulated questions, but users emotionally bonded with it. It was the first sign of the psychological impact of talking to machines.
1974-1980 — First “AI Winter”
Lots of promise, little delivery. Funding dried up. The most ambitious researchers were accused of overhyping.
1997 — Deep Blue defeats Kasparov
IBM built Deep Blue, a chess-dedicated computer. In May 1997, it defeated world champion Garry Kasparov — the first major “AI vs human” moment broadcast to the world.
2011 — Watson wins at Jeopardy!
IBM again. Watson won the American quiz show Jeopardy! against the two greatest champions in history. It marked the era of AI that understands natural language.
2012 — The deep learning revolution
Decisive year. Geoffrey Hinton, Alex Krizhevsky, and Ilya Sutskever won an image recognition competition with a deep neural network (AlexNet) by a crushing margin. It kicked off the current revolution.
Hinton won the 2018 Turing Award — the “Nobel of computing” — alongside Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio.
2016 — AlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol
DeepMind, part of Google, created AlphaGo, which defeated the world Go champion — a game considered impossible for computers. It marked AI arriving at intuition games, not just calculation.
2017 — Transformers change everything
Google researchers published “Attention is All You Need”, introducing the Transformer architecture. Without it, there would be no ChatGPT — it’s the basis of all modern language models.
2022 — ChatGPT popularizes AI
On November 30, 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT. In 5 days, 1 million users. In 2 months, 100 million. It became the fastest-growing tech product in history.
2024-2026 — AI everywhere
- 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics: John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for the foundations of neural networks
- 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper — the latter two for AlphaFold, which mapped proteins with AI
- Models like GPT-5, Gemini Ultra, Claude Opus reach near-human capability in many cognitive tasks
So who invented AI?
There’s no single inventor. It’s like asking who invented medicine. If you had to pick 3 names:
- Alan Turing — the original vision (1950)
- John McCarthy — the name and the field (1956)
- Geoffrey Hinton — the technique that made it work (2012 to today)
To understand today’s AI, see what is Artificial Intelligence, the 4 types of AI, and the 10 practical examples in your daily life.