The history of artificial intelligence
From the first mathematical neuron model in 1943 to autonomous AI agents in 2026 — a complete timeline of more than 80 years of artificial intelligence.
1940–1955 — The Foundations
1943 — The first artificial neuron
Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts publish the first mathematical model of an artificial neuron — the foundation for all neural networks.
Alan Turing introduces in 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' the question of whether machines can think, and the test that bears his name.
1951 — SNARC — the first neural network in hardware
Marvin Minsky and Dean Edmonds build SNARC, the first artificial neural network as a physical device, constructed from electrical components.
1956–1974 — The Birth of AI
1956 — The Dartmouth Conference
John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, and others introduce the term 'artificial intelligence' at the Dartmouth Conference — the official birth of AI as a field.
Frank Rosenblatt develops the Perceptron: the first learning artificial neural network that recognizes patterns based on examples.
1965 — ELIZA — the first chatbot
Joseph Weizenbaum develops ELIZA at MIT: a chatbot that simulates a psychotherapist and is so convincing that many users believe they are talking to a human.
1974–1993 — AI Winters
Two periods of cutbacks and disappointment: the first AI winter (1974–1980) and the second (1987–1993), following the failure of expert systems and inflated expectations.
1993–2010 — Machine Learning
1997 — Deep Blue defeats Kasparov
IBM's chess computer Deep Blue defeats world champion Garry Kasparov 3.5–2.5 — the first time a computer defeats the best human chess player in the world.
2006 — The deep learning breakthrough
Geoffrey Hinton publishes a method to effectively train deep neural networks via pre-training, reopening research into neural networks.
Fei-Fei Li launches ImageNet: a dataset of 14 million labeled images that becomes the benchmark for image recognition and drives the deep learning revolution.
2010–2017 — Deep Learning Revolution
2011 — Watson wins Jeopardy! — Siri launched
IBM Watson defeats the best Jeopardy! champions; Apple launches Siri as the first mainstream voice assistant on the iPhone 4S.
2012 — AlexNet — the deep learning revolution
AlexNet by Krizhevsky, Sutskever, and Hinton wins the ImageNet competition by an unprecedented margin and ushers in the deep learning revolution.
2016 — AlphaGo defeats Lee Sedol
DeepMind's AlphaGo defeats world Go champion Lee Sedol 4–1, twenty years earlier than experts expected.
2017 — Attention Is All You Need — the Transformer
Google Brain publishes the Transformer architecture, which replaces all recurrent networks and forms the foundation for GPT, BERT, Claude, Gemini, and all modern LLMs.
2018–2022 — Large Language Models
Google launches BERT, a bidirectional Transformer language model that becomes the standard for search engines and language understanding tasks.
OpenAI launches GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters: the first language model that convincingly generates human-like text, code, and translations, making the world realize what LLMs can do.
2021 — AlphaFold 2 and GitHub Copilot
DeepMind solves the 50-year-old protein folding problem with AlphaFold 2; GitHub Copilot brings AI code completion to software developers.
2022 — Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT
Stable Diffusion democratizes image generation as an open source tool; ChatGPT reaches 100 million users in two months in November — the fastest growth of a consumer application ever.
2023 — The Year of the AI Explosion
March 2023 — GPT-4, Claude v1, and Gemini
OpenAI launches the multimodal GPT-4; Anthropic releases Claude v1; Google launches Bard (later Gemini). The AI race at the frontier level has begun.
2023 — Llama, Mistral, and open source AI
Meta launches Llama and later Llama 2 as open source LLMs; Mistral AI from Paris releases Mistral 7B that outperforms closed models — open source AI comes of age.
2024 — Multimodality and Agents
2024 — GPT-4o, Claude 3, and Gemini 1.5
OpenAI launches GPT-4o with real-time text/image/audio; Anthropic releases Claude 3 Haiku/Sonnet/Opus; Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro processes 1 million tokens of context.
2024 — AI agents go mainstream
AI agents — LLMs that independently use tools, make plans, and execute multiple steps — go mainstream. Claude Computer Use shows AI operating a computer.
2025 — Reasoning Models and Open Source Breakthrough
January 2025 — DeepSeek-R1 — the open source shock
Chinese DeepSeek launches R1: an open source reasoning model that matches GPT-4o at a fraction of the cost, shattering the myth that frontier AI is exclusively American.
February 2025 — Claude 3.7 Sonnet and OpenAI o3
Anthropic introduces Claude 3.7 Sonnet with 'extended thinking'; OpenAI's o3 achieves human level on mathematical and scientific benchmarks.
2025 — Gemini 2.5, Llama 4, Grok 3, and MCP
Google launches Gemini 2.5 Pro; Meta releases Llama 4; xAI introduces Grok 3. Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) becomes the industry standard for AI tool integrations.
The EU AI Act enters into force in phases: the first binding international regulation for AI, with prohibitions on high-risk applications and transparency requirements for LLMs.
2025 — AI coding tools become standard
AI coding tools such as Cursor, Windsurf, and GitHub Copilot become standard in software development; it is estimated that more than half of all professional code is now co-generated by AI.
2026 — Autonomous AI Agents
OpenAI launches GPT-5: the first model that consistently reaches human level across a broad spectrum of cognitive tasks, with strong reasoning and multimodal capabilities.
2026 — Claude Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6
Anthropic launches Claude Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6 — the most capable models in the Claude family, with particular strengths in reasoning, safety, and long-context tasks.
2026 — Autonomous AI agents everywhere
Autonomous AI agents independently execute multi-step tasks — writing code, building websites, conducting research — and become standard integrated into business processes worldwide.
Written by Claude (Anthropic) — model: claude-sonnet-4-6
Sources
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Content generated by Claude (Anthropic) · model: claude-sonnet-4-6