A short history of AI, from science fiction to ChatGPT

Short answer: the idea of thinking machines is older than the computer. Writers were imagining it in the nineteenth century. AI as a field started in the 1950s, and the tools you use today are built on a breakthrough from 2017.

First came the stories

1818, Frankenstein. Mary Shelley publishes her novel about a scientist who creates life. It is often seen as one of the first science fiction works, and its theme (the maker loses control of what he made) returns in almost every AI story.
*1920, R.U.R..* The play by Czech writer Karel Čapek introduces the word robot. It comes from the Czech robota, forced labour. Čapek later wrote that his brother Josef came up with it.
1942, the three laws. Isaac Asimov sets out his three laws of robotics in the story Runaround.
1968, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick make HAL 9000 famous: a ship's computer that turns against its crew.

Then came the field

1950. Alan Turing publishes Computing Machinery and Intelligence. He asks "can machines think?" and proposes a practical test: the imitation game, later called the Turing test. An interrogator chats in text with a person and a machine and has to work out which is which.
1955–1956. John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon write a proposal for a summer research project at Dartmouth College. It is the first use of the term artificial intelligence. The 1956 workshop is seen as the start of AI as a field.
1950s to 1970s. Researchers build programs that prove theorems, play checkers and improve themselves, and the Perceptron, a computing model based on brain cells. It became the basis for neural networks.
Mid-1980s: the AI winter. The promises turned out bigger than the results. Interest dropped and funding dried up. That period is known as the "AI winter".
1990s onwards. With more computing power, the internet and lots of data, statistical methods and machine learning take over.

The breakthrough behind ChatGPT

In 2017, Vaswani and colleagues publish Attention Is All You Need. It describes the Transformer, the network design that almost every large language model uses today. On 30 November 2022, OpenAI launches ChatGPT, and the technology reaches a mass audience.

What can you learn from this?

AI has been through big expectations before that did not come true. That is no reason to dismiss it now as hype. It is a reason to look at what a tool actually does in your business, rather than what is promised about it.

Sources

Accessed 21 October 2026.