How did artificial intelligence develop over the years?

A short timeline of the milestones worth knowing:

• 1950: Alan Turing asks "Can machines think?" and proposes the Turing Test.
• 1956: the term "artificial intelligence" is coined at the Dartmouth workshop in the US. This is usually taken as AI's birth as a field.
• 1960s–1980s: early programs and rule-based "expert systems". Hopes run high, but computers are too weak, leading to funding cuts known as "AI winters".
• 1997: IBM's Deep Blue beats world chess champion Garry Kasparov.
• 2012: a deep neural network called AlexNet wins a major image recognition contest by a huge margin, kicking off the deep learning boom.
• 2016: Google DeepMind's AlphaGo beats Go champion Lee Sedol, a game once thought too complex for computers.
• 2017: Google researchers publish the "transformer" design, the foundation of today's large language models.
• 2020: DeepMind's AlphaFold largely solves the protein-structure prediction problem. Its creators later shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
• November 2022: ChatGPT launches and reaches 100 million users within about two months, bringing generative AI to the public.
• 2024–2026: AI models that handle text, images, audio and video together, the rise of AI agents, and the first major AI laws.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics also went to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for foundational work on neural networks.