Ehmm, I swear AI didn’t really exist before last year?  

Well, that’s wrong.

Yes - ChatGPT was officially released to the public in November 2022, allowing anyone to access the powers of Generative AI, but the concept of machines performing tasks like humans was actually coined in the 1950’s.

The Birth of AI

Wind back to the 1950’s into the mind of a man that would become world-famous for developing the first computers, decrypting German Enigma machines during WWII, and detailing the Turing Test.

Yes, I am talking about none other than Alan Turing.

Turing published a paper called “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, proposing the Turing Test as a way to measure the machine’s ability to perform human like tasks.

You can read up on it or also just watch The Imitation Game. Gives you the main idea + Keira Knightley is in it too. ;)

Some other milestones in these first years of discovering Artificial Intelligence included:

• 1951 → The first neural network computer (SNARC) is built

• 1956 → AI is born as a field of study

• 1964-66 → ELIZA (the first Natural Language Programme) is developed

• 1967 → The General Problem Solver (GPS) demonstrates human-like problem solving

And then, winter came.

No seriously, it was actually called AI winters. There’s even a wikipedia on it.

AI Research and Development faced significant challenges mainly throughout the 70’s and late 80’s - due to reduced funding and interest in the field.

Although this period was marked by a general slowdown and a few failures (e.g. failure of machine translation in 1966) - setbacks also provided valuable lessons on the complexities of creating intelligent systems.

So things plodded along, until they finally picked back up in the 90’s.

1997: IBM’s Deep Blue defeats chess world Champion Kasparov

The computer won the match 3.5 - 2.5 and Kasparov lost a chess match for the first time in his life.

This also marked the first time a computer beat a human in a complex game and was a major milestone and advancement for Artificial Intelligence.

IBM did it again in 2011, when it’s programme Watson defeated 2 former Jeopardy! champions and was closely followed by Deep Mind in 2015, when AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol in the game of Go.

Deep Mind also developed a deep neural network in the early 2000’s, capable of recognising cats in youtube videos.

All of this success let to Google acquiring Deepmind for ca. 500 Million and developing another programme (AlphaZero), defeating the world’s best chess and shogi engines in a series of matches in 2017.

You starting to realise that beating people at complex games was a trend in testing the abilities of AI?

Fast Forward to where we are now.

2020 → OpenAI announces GPT-3, a significant breakthrough for Natural Language Processing

2022 → ChatGPT is released to the use of the public, going viral

also 2022 → Google fires Blake Lemoine over claims that LamDa was sentient (sentient = able to feel 🫠)

2023 → ChatGPT is wide in use

also 2023 → OpenAI releases GPT-4

also 2023 → Microsoft releases AI updates to Bing

also 2023 → First Open source Models are made available (Mistral, Llama 2, and more)

2024 → The European Parliament formally adopted the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (“AI Act”) in March

also 2024 → Meta releases Llama 3

also 2024 → OpenAI is already training the next model..

…A LOT has been and is happening. Things are really speeding up.

We’ve already listed the main trends to look out for in 2024. If you missed that issue, you can read up on it here.

But don’t worry, there is a lot more to come and we will always make sure the most important news reach you first.

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