The Story of Artificial Intelligence | Explained in Under 10 Minutes

Artificial intelligence didn't arrive out of nowhere — it has been seventy years in the making, shaped by visionaries, two brutal funding winters, and a series of moments that kept rewriting what anyone thought was possible. The story begins in 1950, with a British codebreaker named Alan Turing asking a deceptively simple question: can machines think?Emma leads the team through the full arc: from the 1956 Dartmouth conference where the term "artificial intelligence" was coined, through the collapse of early optimism and the AI winters of the 1970s and 80s, to the quiet decades when neural network researchers worked in near-obscurity. Then 2012: a team led by Geoffrey Hinton enters an image recognition competition and obliterates the field. By 2016, AlphaGo is defeating the world's greatest Go players — not by brute force, but by something that looks uncomfortably like intuition. And in 2017, a Google paper called "Attention Is All You Need" introduces the transformer architecture that underpins every language model you use today.The team unpack how deep learning actually works, why cheap graphics cards turned out to be as important as clever algorithms, and what it means that the internet's billions of labelled images became the training data for machine intelligence. They also trace the darker questions that arrived with ChatGPT's hundred-million-user debut in 2022 — about jobs, about truth, about who controls the most powerful technology ever built.The origin story of AI is over. The question now is who writes the next chapter — and what they decide it's for.Have a topic you'd love us to explain? Send your suggestions to [email protected] — we read every one!