History & Evolution

AI didn't appear overnight with ChatGPT. It's been a seven-decade journey of bold ambitions, spectacular failures, quiet breakthroughs and sudden explosions of capability. Understanding this history isn't just academic - it gives you a much better sense of where things might be heading and, crucially, why you should be sceptical when someone claims this time everything is different. The pattern of AI development has been remarkably consistent: a burst of excitement, overblown promises, disappointment when reality falls short, followed by a quieter period where genuine progress happens away from the spotlight. We're arguably in the biggest excitement phase yet, and knowing the history helps you judge which developments represent real shifts and which are just the latest round of hype. It also reveals something important: many of today's "breakthroughs" are built on ideas that have been around for decades - they just needed more data and faster computers to finally work.