Artificial Intelligence is one of the biggest technical innovations humans have created. The ability for a computer to compute and create. It’s crazy when one thinks about how AI was originally conceptualized in the 1950s by Alan Turing as an ambitious dream to create machines capable of thinking. Turing originally posed the question “Can a machine think?” This led to him proposing the Turing Test to measure machine intelligence.
By 1956, John McCarthy, a computer scientist and cognitive scientist who is now known as the father of AI, coined the term Artificial Intelligence. This gave birth to the field of AI creating the Dartmouth Summer Research Project. The summer project was a summer workshop that brought together many of the most intelligent minds in computing and cognitive science. Around the 60s, we had systems such as “ELIZA” which was able to simulate conversations and “Shaky” which was the first mobile robot capable of reasoning. Of course being so early in the life span of AI’s existence, there were shortcomings. Cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky and Mathematician Seymour Papert studied heavily in AI and highlighted the limits of early neural networks.
AI since then has progressed in a slow and steady pace with momentum steering in the 1990s from advancements in computing power which allowed evolutions of prior AI to be functional such as IBM’s Deep Blue, which was able to defeat a Chess Champion Garry Kasparov which showed AI thinking potential. Other forms of Artificial Intelligence like ImageNet were also made which is an AI that scans images.
In 2010 AI became much more popular with virtual assistants like Siri. AI stayed around this pace for a decade until 2020. OpenAI was able to create an AI called GPT-3. It was the first AI that was able to generate coherent text. It evolved to what society knows today as ChatGPT which has created SubAI such as DALL-E which is able to create images. GPT4 was the next iteration of ChatGPT which could draft essays and write code. Unfortunately GPT4 would be heavily abused as it had the power to pretty much solve anything and would be used heavily in schools including four year universities. As of right now AI is very powerful yet falls short of general intelligence like not being able to have true understanding of feelings or common sense.
Still AI far exceeds a lot of our original predictions of what society thought AI would finalize into and yet AI is still evolving. AI models are able to help with health care, business and finance, transportation, security, and everyday life. It’s used to help solve problems and to solve problems for people ethically as well as unethically in some cases. It is the future, and it will continue to grow and benefit people through personalized medicine, customer service, and education.
