The History of Artificial Intelligence: From Turing to ChatGPT

In this episode, we trace the extraordinary history of artificial intelligence from Alan Turing’s deceptively simple question, “Can machines think?” to the arrival of ChatGPT and the modern generative AI boom. Along the way, we explore the birth of AI at the 1956 Dartmouth conference, the rise of symbolic reasoning and expert systems, the disappointments of the AI winters, the breakthrough shift toward machine learning, the deep learning revolution, and the transformer architecture that made today’s large language models possible. It’s a story of brilliant ideas, bold predictions, humbling failures, and sudden leaps forward, showing that AI did not appear out of nowhere. It was built over decades by mathematicians, computer scientists, philosophers, engineers, and dreamers who kept returning to one of humanity’s most provocative questions: what does it really mean for a machine to be intelligent?