Editing History of Artificial Intelligence (section)

== <span style="color: #FFFFFF;">Understanding</span> ==
AI history is best understood as a series of **paradigm shifts** driven by new ideas, new data, and new compute:

**1950s–1960s: Symbolic optimism**. McCarthy, Minsky, and colleagues believed AI was imminent — general intelligence via symbolic logic and search. Programs solved toy problems impressively, leading to overconfident predictions. The reality: logic-based systems couldn't handle real-world ambiguity, noise, or scale.

**1970s–1980s: First winter and expert systems**. After failures to deliver on promises, funding dried up. Expert systems revived interest by encoding specialized knowledge in rule bases — MYCIN (medical diagnosis), XCON (computer configuration). These worked for narrow domains but were brittle, expensive to maintain, and couldn't learn from data.

**1990s–2000s: Statistical machine learning**. The machine learning community, drawing from statistics, proved that data-driven pattern recognition could outperform hand-coded rules for many tasks. SVMs, decision trees, random forests, and boosting algorithms dominated. Feature engineering — manually designing input representations — was the key differentiating skill.

**2012–present: The deep learning revolution**. AlexNet's breakthrough demonstrated that deep convolutional networks trained end-to-end on GPU clusters could outperform decades of hand-engineered vision systems. This triggered a cascade: ImageNet → deep learning → transformers (2017) → BERT (2018) → GPT-3 (2020) → ChatGPT (2022) → GPT-4 (2023). Each step moved AI from narrow, task-specific systems toward more general capabilities.

**What enabled the revolution?**: Three simultaneous improvements: (1) **Compute**: GPU clusters, then TPUs, enabled training at scales previously impossible. (2) **Data**: the internet created unprecedented amounts of labeled and unlabeled data. (3) **Algorithms**: backpropagation + rectified linear units + better initialization made deep networks trainable.
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