FOUNDATIONS · 1950–1979
1950
Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"
Can machines think? The foundational text.
◆ MILESTONE
1956
Dartmouth Workshop — AI Is Born
McCarthy, Minsky coin "artificial intelligence."
1969
Perceptron Controversy — First AI Winter
Neural network limitations proven. Funding evaporates.
◆ MILESTONE
WINTERS & EXPERT SYSTEMS · 1980–1999
1986
Backpropagation Popularized
Hinton plants the seed of deep learning.
◆ MILESTONE
1997
Deep Blue Defeats Kasparov
Brute force, not learning. The world takes notice.
◆ MILESTONE
DEEP LEARNING REVIVAL · 2000–2016
2012
AlexNet — Deep Learning's Big Bang
Error rates halved. GPUs become AI's engine.
◆ MILESTONE
2016
AlphaGo Defeats Lee Sedol
Move 37. AI finds solutions humans never imagined.
◆ MILESTONE
TRANSFORMER ERA · 2017–2023
2017
"Attention Is All You Need"
The transformer enables everything that follows.
◆ MILESTONE
2020
GPT-3: 175B Parameters
Scale leads to capability. The scaling laws hold.
◆ MILESTONE
2022
ChatGPT Goes Mainstream
100M users in 2 months. Everything changes.
◆ MILESTONE
FRONTIER ERA · 2024–NOW
2024
Reasoning Models Emerge
o1, Claude 3.5, Gemini. Chain-of-thought is standard.
◆ MILESTONE
2025
AI Agents Enter the Workforce
Claude Code, Devin do real autonomous work.
▶ YOU ARE HERE — MAR 2026
New milestones added as they happen.
2026
Claude 5 — Another Reasoning Leap
40% gains. The frontier keeps moving.
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