---
title: "How did artificial intelligence develop over the years?"  
description: "How did artificial intelligence develop over the years?"  
author: "Lea Hartmann"  
published: 2026-11-14  
updated: 2026-11-14  
canonical: https://answers.mindstick.com/qa/120049/how-did-artificial-intelligence-develop-over-the-years  
category: "Artificial Intelligence"  
tags: ["history of AI", "Alan Turing", "AlphaGo", "chatgpt", "AI timeline"]  
reading_time: 2 minutes  

---

# How did artificial intelligence develop over the years?



## Answers

### Answer by Laura Larsen

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.


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