AI Through the Ages
This decade saw John McCarthy coin the term 'artificial intelligence' at the Dartmouth Conference, establishing AI as a formal academic discipline and launching the field that would fundamentally reshape how popular culture imagines the relationship between humans and machines
What is the 1950s?
This broad field of computer science aims to create systems capable of tasks requiring human-like cognition, such as learning, reasoning, and perception.
What is artificial intelligence (AI)?
Users provide this input to generative AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E to specify what kind of content they want created.
What is a prompt?
This tech company, rebranded from Facebook in 2021, developed the open-source Llama series of large language models and integrates AI features like automated image editing and AI stickers across Instagram and WhatsApp.
What is Meta?
This AI from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey' delivered the chilling line 'I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that,' becoming a cultural shorthand for technology turning against its human creators and influencing decades of sci-fi depictions of rebellious artificial intelligence.
Who/What is HAL 9000?
Arthur Samuel's machine learning program for this strategy game became the first AI system to achieve superhuman performance in a competitive domain, setting the template for modern AI benchmarking through game mastery.
What is checkers?
This subset of AI focuses on statistical algorithms that enable systems to learn from data patterns, generalize to new data, and automatically improve at tasks like prediction and classification without explicit programming.
What is Machine Learning (ML)?
This type of AI model trains on multiple data types - text, images, audio, and video - allowing them to understand and generate content across different formats in one integrated system, like GPT-4's ability to analyze photos and describe them.
What is multimodal?
Founded by Sam Altman and others, this AI research company launched ChatGPT in November 2022, sparking widespread public adoption of conversational AI and now reaching 400 million weekly active users.
What is OpenAI?
This 2013 Spike Jonze film about a man falling in love with his AI operating system redefined popular culture's portrayal of artificial intelligence from dystopian threat to intimate romantic companion.
What is Her?
This seasonal term coined in the 1980s described the period of reduced funding and interest in AI research following inflated expectations, becoming a cautionary cultural reference for the boom-bust cycles that continue to shape public perception and investment in artificial intelligence today.
What is AI Winter?
These generative AI models specialize in processing natural language and code after being trained on vast amounts of text data scraped from the Internet.
What are Large Language Models (LLMs)?
This technique enables language models to pull information from external databases, documents, and web sources in real time rather than relying solely on training data.
What is Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)?
This search giant developed the Transformer architecture that revolutionized AI, launched the Bard chatbot to compete with ChatGPT, and now integrates its multimodal Gemini models across Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube, and its core search engine.
What is Google?
In this 2014 Alex Garland thriller starring Oscar Isaac and Alicia Vikander, a programmer conducts a modified Turing Test on a visibly robotic AI, forcing audiences to question what truly constitutes machine consciousness.
What is Ex Machina?
This IBM supercomputer's 1997 victory over chess world champion Garry Kasparov became a defining cultural moment that shifted public perception of AI from science fiction fantasy to imminent reality, reinforcing the tradition of using competitive game mastery as the benchmark for measuring artificial intelligence progress.
What is Deep Blue?
These machine learning models (also known as a type of AI) train on existing data to classify and sort new data, powering applications from email spam detection to medical image diagnosis.
What is discriminative AI/model?
The maximum total input and output of a single conversation with a chatbot, including any files uploaded, and measured in tokens.
What is the context window?
Founded by former OpenAI researchers including Dario Amodei, this AI safety company developed Claude using Constitutional AI methods, distinguishing itself through superior reasoning, coding, and long-form writing capabilities.
What is Anthropic?
This perpetually depressed robot from Douglas Adams' 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' complains about his 'brain the size of a planet' being wasted on menial tasks, representing the existential melancholy that might plague truly intelligent machines.
Who is Marvin, the paranoid android?
In 2016, this Google DeepMind AI program defeated the world champion of Go, a game considered far more complex for computers than chess, meeting a major milestone of advancement into games previously considered beyond computational reach.
What is AlphaGo?
This hypothetical AI milestone represents systems that could match or exceed human cognitive abilities across all domains and tasks, not just specialized areas like current AI.
What is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)?
These autonomous generative AI systems are able to interface with external systems to take real-world action, such booking a flight on your behalf.
What are agents?
This Chinese AI startup disrupted the industry in January 2025 when its R1 reasoning model matched OpenAI's o1 performance at a fraction of the training cost, demonstrating the benefits of efficient training approaches.
What is DeepSeek?
This AI butler from the Iron Man comics and MCU films established the template for the helpful, sophisticated digital assistant that became the aspiration for real-world voice AI development.
Who/What is JARVIS?