~$ git log --reverse --oneline ai/

Timeline

35 milestones from the wall, oldest first. Each links to its page and its primary source.

1940s

1. 1943

   First mathematical model of a neural network

   Warren McCulloch & Walter Pitts · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

2. 1948

   Information theory

   Claude Shannon · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

1950s

1. 1950

   The imitation game (Turing test)

   Alan Turing · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

2. 1955

   The term “artificial intelligence”

   John McCarthy · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

3. 1955

   Co-founding the field

   Marvin Minsky · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

4. 1955

   Co-writing the Dartmouth proposal

   Nathaniel Rochester · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

5. 1956

   Logic Theorist

   Allen Newell & Herbert A. Simon · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

6. 1958

   The perceptron

   Frank Rosenblatt · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

7. 1959

   A program that learned to play checkers

   Arthur Samuel · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

1960s

1. 1966

   ELIZA, the first chatbot

   Joseph Weizenbaum · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

1980s

1. 1982

   Hopfield networks

   John Hopfield · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

2. 1986

   Backpropagation goes mainstream

   David Rumelhart, Geoffrey Hinton & Ronald Williams · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

3. 1988

   Bayesian networks & causal reasoning

   Judea Pearl · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

1990s

1. 1994

   Large-scale AI systems

   Edward Feigenbaum & Raj Reddy · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

2. 1997

   Long short-term memory (LSTM)

   Sepp Hochreiter & Jürgen Schmidhuber · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

3. 1998

   Convolutional networks (LeNet)

   Yann LeCun · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

2000s

1. 2009

   ImageNet

   Fei-Fei Li & the ImageNet team · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

2010s

1. 2012

   AlexNet

   Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever & Geoffrey Hinton · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

2. 2014

   Generative adversarial networks (GANs)

   Ian Goodfellow & co-authors · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

3. 2016

   AlphaGo

   David Silver & the AlphaGo team · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

4. 2017

   The Transformer

   The Transformer eight · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

5. 2018

   Turing Award for deep learning

   Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun & Yoshua Bengio · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

6. 2018

   BERT

   Jacob Devlin & the BERT team · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

2020s

1. 2020

   GPT-3 and few-shot learning

   Tom Brown & the GPT-3 team · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

2. 2021

   AlphaFold

   John Jumper, Demis Hassabis & the AlphaFold team · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

3. 2024

   Nobel Prize in Physics

   Geoffrey Hinton · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

4. 2024

   Turing Award for reinforcement learning

   Richard Sutton & Andrew Barto · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

5. 2025

   Kyoto Prize for the theory of learning machines

   Shun-ichi Amari · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

6. 2025

   GPU hardware that let machine learning scale

   Bill Dally · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

7. 2025

   Reasoning learned through reinforcement learning

   Daya Guo & the DeepSeek-R1 team · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

8. 2025

   AlphaEvolve: a coding agent that discovers algorithms

   Matej Balog, Alexander Novikov & the AlphaEvolve team · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

9. 2025

   AlphaProof: formal maths proofs by reinforcement learning

   Thomas Hubert, Rishi Mehta, Laurent Sartran & the AlphaProof team · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

10. 2026

    AlphaGenome: reading the regulatory code of DNA

    Žiga Avsec, Natasha Latysheva, Jun Cheng & the AlphaGenome team · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

11. 2026

    Multi-agent systems

    Nicholas R. Jennings · source ↗ (opens in new tab)

12. 2026

    Computers and Thought Award

    Jiajun Wu · source ↗ (opens in new tab)