Artificial intelligence: the key moments
From Alan Turing’s question “Can machines think?” to chatbots used by hundreds of millions of people.
- Oct 1950“Can machines think?”
Alan Turing proposes the imitation game, now called the Turing test.
Reference ↗ - Summer 1956The Dartmouth workshop
The founding event of AI as a field; the term “artificial intelligence” comes from its 1955 proposal.
Reference ↗ - 1966ELIZA
Joseph Weizenbaum’s program at MIT imitates a psychotherapist — the first chatbot.
Reference ↗ - 11 May 1997Deep Blue beats Kasparov
A computer defeats the world chess champion in a match.
Reference ↗ - Feb 2011Watson wins Jeopardy!Reference ↗
- 2012The deep-learning breakthrough
AlexNet wins the ImageNet competition by a wide margin.
Reference ↗ - Mar 2016AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol
DeepMind’s program wins 4–1 at Go.
Reference ↗ - Jun 2017The transformer
The paper “Attention Is All You Need” introduces the architecture behind today’s language models.
Reference ↗ - Nov 2020AlphaFold 2
AI predicts protein structures with accuracy close to experiments.
Reference ↗ - 30 Nov 2022ChatGPT
OpenAI’s chatbot reaches an estimated 100 million users within about two months.
Reference ↗ - 1 Aug 2024The EU AI Act enters into force
The first comprehensive AI law, applied in stages.
Reference ↗ - Oct 2024Nobel Prizes for AI
John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton win in physics; Demis Hassabis and John Jumper share the chemistry prize with David Baker.
Reference ↗ - Feb 2026India hosts the AI Impact Summit
Leaders and companies gather at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi; the summit ends with a leaders’ declaration.
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