Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence
In the summer of 1956, a small group of scientists gathered at Dartmouth College for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence.
HISTORY OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI History: A Source-Backed History of Artificial Intelligence
LINEAiGE documents the history of artificial intelligence as an evidence trail. The main AI-history timeline begins in 1956, while earlier foundations and precursors are preserved separately so the project does not blur prehistory with the recognized research field.
When does AI history begin?
LINEAiGE uses 1956 as the boundary for artificial intelligence as a recognized research field, centered on the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. Earlier work is not erased: it is documented as prehistory, foundations and precursors.
Selected AI history milestones
The Perceptron
Frank Rosenblatt published The Perceptron: A Probabilistic Model for Information Storage and Organization in the Brain in Psychological Review.
Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I
John McCarthy published 'Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I' in April 1960.
DENDRAL Documented in Stanford Machine-Induction Research Memo
On April 5, 1965, Edward A. Feigenbaum and R. W. Watson issued An Initial Problem Statement for a Machine Induction Research Project at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project.
SHRDLU development period completed
Terry Winograd later documented that he developed SHRDLU at MIT between 1968 and 1970.
Learning representations by back-propagating errors
David E. Rumelhart, Geoffrey E. Hinton and Ronald J. Williams published Learning representations by back-propagating errors in Nature on 9 October 1986.
Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov
IBM's Deep Blue defeated reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match completed on 11 May 1997, winning 3.5 to 2.5 under standard tournament time controls.
ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey E. Hinton published ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks in the 2012 Neural Information Processing Systems.
Attention Is All You Need
Vaswani and colleagues introduced the Transformer architecture in Attention Is All You Need.
Introducing ChatGPT
OpenAI publicly introduced ChatGPT on November 30, 2022 as a conversational model released for research preview and user feedback.
GPT-4 Public Introduction
OpenAI publicly introduced GPT-4 on March 14, 2023. OpenAI described GPT-4 as a large multimodal model capable of accepting image and text inputs and producing text outputs.
Gemini 1.5 Pro Early Preview
Google announced Gemini 1.5 on February 15, 2024 and began a limited early preview of Gemini 1.5 Pro for developers and enterprise customers through AI Studio and Vertex AI.
DeepSeek-R1 Release
DeepSeek publicly released DeepSeek-R1 on January 20, 2025.
Before 1956: foundations and precursors
These verified records predate the main AI-history timeline and are kept in their own layer.
On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem
Alan Turing's paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem was received on May 28, 1936 and is recorded by Oxford Academic as published on January 1, 1937.
A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity
Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts published A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity in The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics in December 1943.
Programming a Computer for Playing Chess
Claude E. Shannon published Programming a Computer for Playing Chess in Philosophical Magazine in March 1950.
Computing Machinery and Intelligence
Alan Turing published Computing Machinery and Intelligence in Mind, framing machine intelligence through the imitation game and asking whether machines can think.
Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence Proposal
John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon authored the proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, dated August 31, 1955.
How LINEAiGE builds the timeline
Every public historical record is admitted only after evidence review. Date precision is preserved, chronology is kept separate from causal claims, and each record exposes its source trail.