Events
Deep dives into the landmark moments that shaped AI — the conferences, the breakthroughs, the winters, and the explosions that changed everything.
The Origins
The moments that set everything in motion · E1–E5
The Dartmouth Conference, 1956: The Summer AI Was Born
Summer 1956
Who was in the room, what they argued about, what they got right, what they got catastrophically wrong — and why giving a field a…
Read more →The Turing Test, 1950: The Question That Still Has No Answer
October 1950
The paper, the test, the nine objections Turing answered himself, ELIZA, the Chinese Room, and why seventy-five years later the…
Read more →The Logic Theorist, 1956: The First AI Program
December 1955 – Summer 1956
The night Newell and Simon's program proved mathematical theorems — and why they believed they had cracked human intelligence.
Read more →ELIZA, 1966: The Chatbot That Made People Cry
1966
A simple pattern-matching program accidentally became the world's most intimate conversationalist. The story of the first chatbot…
Read more →The Lighthill Report, 1973: The Document That Killed AI
1973
How one British mathematician's critical review caused governments worldwide to pull AI funding and sent the field into its first…
Read more →The Crashes & Comebacks
The booms, busts, and stubborn revivals · E6–E10
The First AI Winter, 1974–1980: The Great Disillusionment
1974–1980
The funding collapse, the broken promises, the researchers who lost their jobs — and the underground survivors who kept the flame…
Read more →The Rise of Expert Systems, 1980: AI Gets a Job
1980–1987
How MYCIN, XCON, and thousands of corporate AI systems made real money by going narrow. The comeback story — and the seeds of the…
Read more →Japan's Fifth Generation Project, 1982: The Billion-Dollar Gamble
1982–1992
The most audacious AI project in history, the global panic it triggered, and its quiet, spectacular failure.
Read more →The Second AI Winter, 1987–1993: Lightning Strikes Twice
1987–1993
The Lisp machine market collapse, DARPA funding cuts, the death of expert systems — and the second time the world gave up on AI.
Read more →Backpropagation Goes Mainstream, 1986: The Algorithm That Refused to Die
1986
How Hinton, Rumelhart, and Williams revived a buried idea and planted the seed for everything that came after.
Read more →The Turning Points
The moments that changed the trajectory · E11–E15
Deep Blue vs. Kasparov, 1997: The Match the World Watched
1996–1997
The full story of both matches, the controversy, Kasparov's accusations of cheating, and what it meant for AI — and for what it…
Read more →The Netflix Prize, 2006: The Moment the Crowd Beat the Experts
2006–2009
How a $1 million open competition accelerated machine learning by a decade and established the template for AI research.
Read more →The ImageNet Project, 2009: Teaching Machines to See
2006–2012
How Fei-Fei Li assembled 14 million labelled images — and why that dataset became the launching pad for modern AI.
Read more →AlexNet, 2012: The Breakthrough Nobody Saw Coming
2012
The ImageNet competition, the moment deep learning proved it was categorically different. The starting gun of the modern AI era.
Read more →AlphaGo vs. Lee Sedol, 2016: Move 37
March 2016
The move that made a grandmaster stare at the board in disbelief. The moment the world understood that something genuinely new…
Read more →The Modern Era
The events that built the AI world we live in · E16–E20
Google Brain Is Founded, 2011: The Quiet Beginning of Everything
2011
The secret project inside Google that changed the company — and the world. How a small team of researchers quietly built the…
Read more →"Attention Is All You Need," 2017: The Paper That Runs the World
2017
The Google paper that introduced the transformer architecture — the engine inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and every major AI…
Read more →OpenAI Is Founded, 2015: A Billion Dollars to Save the World
December 2015
Musk, Altman, Brockman, Sutskever in a room — what they said, what they promised, how the non-profit became a capped-profit.
Read more →GPT-3, 2020: The First Time AI Felt Different
June 2020
The moment language models became genuinely eerie — the demos, the viral moments, the researchers who got nervous.
Read more →The OpenAI Board Crisis, 2023: The Coup That Shook the Industry
November 2023
The firing, the chaos, the 500 employees threatening to quit — and what the most dramatic weekend in AI history revealed.
Read more →The Reckoning
The events forcing the world to decide what AI should be · E21–E25
ChatGPT Launches, November 2022: The Day Everything Changed
November 30, 2022
One hundred million users in sixty days. The world's reaction. The moment that divided history into before and after.
Read more →The Timnit Gebru Firing, 2020: AI's Reckoning with Bias
December 2020
The research paper, the firing, the open letter — and the debate about who gets to shape AI and whose harms are taken seriously.
Read more →The EU AI Act, 2024: The World's First Major AI Law
2024
How Europe decided to regulate AI, what the law actually says, and whether rules can keep pace with a technology changing faster…
Read more →Geoffrey Hinton Resigns from Google, 2023: The Godfather Speaks Out
May 2023
Why the man who built the foundation of modern AI quit Google to warn the world — and what it means when the field's most…
Read more →The AI Arms Race: US vs. China
2017–present
The export bans, the chip wars, the national AI strategies — and how artificial intelligence became the defining geopolitical…
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