Birth of the field of artificial intelligence: A workshop at Dartmouth College conceives the name “Artificial Intelligence”. In the following years, optimism about AI’s potential leads to significant government funding and the establishment of AI research labs in prestigious universities across the US.

ELIZA: The first chatbot: Joseph Weizenbaum creates ELIZA at the MIT AI lab. ELIZA was a computer program that could simulate conversation with users, often described as the first chatbot. This was groundbreaking as it began to show the potential for machines to mimic human-like interaction.

Deep Blue defeats the world chess champion: IBM’s AI, Deep Blue, beats the reigning human world champion, Garry Kasparov, in a game of chess. This victory was a major milestone as it showcased AI’s potential to outperform humans at complex tasks.

Watson wins Jeopardy!: Watson, another IBM’s AI, wins the game show Jeopardy! against the top human champions. This demonstrated AI’s ability to understand complex language queries and answer accurately.

Google’s Neural Network identifies a cat: Google Brain team develops a neural network that teaches itself to recognize a cat in a series of YouTube videos. It was an important achievement in unsupervised machine learning and deep learning.

Amazon Echo Introduces Alexa: Amazon introduces Echo, the voice-activated smart home speaker, with the digital assistant, Alexa. Alexa, powered by AI, can perform tasks like answering questions, playing music, setting reminders, and controlling other smart home devices. This becomes a major milestone in bringing AI to everyday home use.

Google’s AlphaGo defeats world champion Go player: Google DeepMind’s AI AlphaGo defeats 18-time world champion Lee Sedol in the complex game of Go. This was significant because Go is exponentially more complicated than chess, with more possible moves, making it a much harder game for AI to master.

Sophia the AI Robot gains Saudi Citizenship: An AI humanoid robot called Sophia, developed by Hong Kong based company Hanson Robotics, becomes the first robot to receive citizenship of a country. Sophia can simulate a large number of human facial expressions, interact with people, and even hold basic conversations. This event marked the increasingly blurred lines between artificial intelligence and legal and civil rights.

ChatGPT Becomes Widely Available: OpenAI further develops its GPT line, bringing the AI conversational model ChatGPT to a broader audience. Originally designed as a research project, the model can draft emails, write Python code, answer trivia questions, and perform many other tasks. OpenAI’s decision to make ChatGPT more widely accessible and the expansion of its usage marked a significant step in the integration of AI into everyday life and cross-industry applications.

Expansion of AI into a Household Word: By 2022, AI technologies had become more integrated into daily life. Innovations in voice assistants, personalization algorithms for streaming and shopping services, and health monitoring (using AI to monitor heart rate, sleep patterns, exercise habits, etc. with smartwatches and other wearable tech) become increasingly commonplace. It also was the year that the whole world started to understand how AI would be ubiquitous.

AI-Controlled Drones Outperform Human Pilots: OpenAI announces the successful testing of AI-controlled drones executing complex maneuvers with higher precision than human-controlled counterparts. These autonomous drones highlight AI’s advancements in interpreting and interacting with the physical environment, suggesting extensive future applications from delivery services to emergency response. This milestone underscores a new level of AI sophistication, exhibiting its capacity to outperform humans in real-world, tactile tasks.