The first AI researchers asked for one summer. The work is now seventy years old.
F7 · Where AI Came From
Artificial intelligence has meant very different machines since 1956. This chapter follows the two camps that took turns leading: people who wrote the rules by hand, and people who let machines learn from examples. You will step through a game tree the way chess programs think ahead, race a blind search against A*, make an expert system get stuck, and see why the money ran out twice. Then come the turns that built today's AI: data and chips in 2012, attention in 2017, chat in 2022, and Arabic models from the Gulf. You finish with a short checklist for reading AI news without the hype.
- What People Mean by AI
- Rules Written by Hand
- Thinking Ahead
- The Shortest Way There
- Experts in a Box
- The Knowledge Bottleneck
- Two Winters
- Learning from Examples Instead
- Games as Milestones
- Data and Chips
- Attention and Scale
- Chat Goes Public
- AI in the Arab World
- What It Can and Cannot Do
- Reading AI News Without the Hype