Module 2 · Level I · Foundations

A short history of AI

From Turing and the 1956 Dartmouth workshop through two AI winters, deep learning and the transformer to ChatGPT and agents: how we got here, and what it predicts.

6 lessons · about 1 hour

The module in 49 secondsCaptions on · sound optional

What’s inside

  1. 01
    Can machines think? Turing, Dartmouth and a new field

    How a 1950 paper by Alan Turing and a 1956 summer workshop at Dartmouth College gave AI its central question and its name. · 10 min

  2. 02
    Early optimism, symbolic AI and ELIZA

    The first two decades of AI: rule-based reasoning, the first learning machines, bold predictions, and a 1960s chatbot that fooled people surprisingly easily. · 10 min

  3. 03
    Two AI winters, and the expert-systems boom between them

    Why funding and interest in AI collapsed twice, what the UK's Lighthill report said, and how the 1980s expert-systems boom rose and fell. · 10 min

  4. 04
    Learning from data: from Deep Blue to deep learning

    How machine learning quietly took over, why Deep Blue's chess win was an old-style triumph, and how ImageNet, AlexNet and AlphaGo started the deep learning boom. · 11 min

  5. 05
    From the transformer to ChatGPT, and on to agents

    How a 2017 research paper led to GPT, ChatGPT's record-breaking launch in 2022, and the multimodal, reasoning, open-weight and agent models of 2023 to 2026. · 12 min

  6. 06
    The timeline, and what history teaches

    Seventy-five years of AI on one page, and the patterns that help you judge what comes next. · 9 min

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Also at Level I

1What AI actually is
AI, machine learning, deep learning and generative AI, untangled: what each term means, what it doesn't, and why the hype and the fear both miss.3How machines learn
Data, training and prediction; supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning, explained with everyday examples and no maths.4Types and styles of AI
Narrow and general, predictive and generative, rules and learning: the different styles of AI and where you already meet each one.5Meet the models
Language, image, speech and video models; open and closed; large and small; reasoning models: the kinds of model behind the tools, and who makes them.