Who Created AI? Tracing the History of Artificial Intelligence

Whenever someone asks, “Who created AI?”, they are usually looking for a single name, like Thomas Edison, who invented the lightbulb, or Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. But unlike them, AI is a concept that was not made by a single man or woman. Instead, it was built over decades, thanks to advancements in computing and efforts from a long list of people. So here’s the real story of who created AI.

Key Players Who Created AI

To correctly answer “Who created AI?”, we need to trace the roots of artificial intelligence, which go back as far as the early 1900s. Over the century, there have been key milestones in this field that have helped us reach the current era of generative AI and large language models (LLMs). But if you need a short answer, here are the key players who helped create AI.

• Alan Turing: The British mathematician who shaped the idea of AI and laid the theoretical foundation for AI. Alan Turing asked whether machines could think and proposed the famous Turing Test to measure machine intelligence.
• John McCarthy: The computer scientist who coined the term “Artificial Intelligence” at the historic Dartmouth Conference in 1956 and created the field. He also developed the LISP programming language that was fundamental to early AI research.
• Claude Shannon: The mathematician who co-organized the 1956 Dartmouth conference and created one of the first learning machines. He developed a mechanical mouse that could learn to navigate mazes through trial and error.
• Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon: The duo built the first the AI program such as Logic Theorist and General Problem Solver. These programs showed that machines could perform logical reasoning and solve complex problems.
• Joseph Weizenbaum: Developed the first AI chatbot called ELIZA, simulating human-like conversation.
• Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio: The pioneers of deep learning who developed backpropagation techniques, allowing neural networks to learn from data. This is the basis of today’s AI systems. Geoffrey Hinton received the Nobel Prize in 2024 for the “foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”
• Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto: They are the pioneers of Reinforcement Learning (RL), which are used in AI reasoning models to game-playing AI systems like AlphaGo.
• Google Researchers: The team that introduced the Transformer architecture in 2017 (“Attention Is All You Need”) and it powers nearly all AI chatbots including ChatGPT, Gemini, and more.

The First Person Who Started It All: Alan Turing

British cryptanalyst Alan Turing is the first person who paved the way for modern AI. He published a landmark paper in 1950 called Computing Machinery and Intelligence, which asked the most important question in the field of AI: “Can a machine think?” He also introduced his famous Turning Test, which has been featured in sci-fi movies.

It checks whether a machine could have a conversation (over a teleprinter), that is as convincing as talking to another human. If it passes the test, then it wouldn’t be wrong to say that the machine exhibits intelligent behavior. Suffice it to say that modern chatbots can easily pass the Turing test to a certain degree. While Alan Turning might not have built modern AI, he laid the bedrock for it.

The Birth of AI: The Dartmouth Conference

Later, American computer scientist John McCarthy, along with Claude Shannon, Marvin Minsky, and Nathaniel Rochester would organize the Dartmouth Conference in 1956 and coined the term Artificial Intelligence. Decades later, we still use it to this day. This conference included several key players who played a significant role in shaping AI as we know it today. It not only laid the foundation for AI, but also set out its goals and how to achieve them.

McCarthy also created LISP, which is one of the earliest known programming languages used for the research of AI. It is because of these reasons that John McCarthy is known as the father of AI. So, if you just wanted to know who created AI as a field of study, then he is the one to consider.

The First AI Programs: Logic Theorist and General Problem Solver

Two of the attendees of the Dartmouth Conference were Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon, who “debuted” their Logic Theorist at the same event. This was one of the first AI systems created, which was built in 1955, and could solve mathematical problems.

This was the first time a machine demonstrated human reasoning. However, it could only perform one task. So later on, Newell and Simon would go on to make the General Problem Solver, which could carry out different types of problems, showing the world that AI was not just a theory anymore. Their work helped to shape the practical part of AI research.

The First AI Chatbot and How AI Winter Came to Be

After the Dartmouth Conference, development and research in the field of AI reached new heights at the time. Government agencies saw the prospect and started investing in such projects. Like Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, developed in 1964. It was the first example of a chatbot that could reply to people like a real human. But it had limited responses and often just reiterated what users told it.

In the same period, Frank Rosenblatt introduced the Perceptron, which was the first neural network. However, it was limited by the technology of its time. The funding for the project also stopped after Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert published the book “Perceptrons”. It amplified the negativity around neural networks to the point where no money was provided for AI research, resulting in an AI winter.

The Revival: Backpropagation and Neural Networks

During the 1980s, researchers like Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun helped make huge advancements in the field again. They developed backpropagation algorithms to train the network using the available data rather than relying on excessive programming, essentially, helping the computer learn patterns and data structures just like our brain does.

It also revived interest in neural networks and laid the foundation for deep learning, which is a big factor in the creation of modern AI models.

The People Who Created Modern AI

Over the 2000s, advancements in algorithms and GPU power allowed for the development of large trainable models. It also made image recognition possible. A crucial moment came in 2012 when Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton created AlexNet, a deep neural network that performed much better than other AI systems used for image recognition.

It proved that deep learning could outperform traditional AI methods and it sparked interest in neural networks. Now in 2017, a team of Google researchers introduced the transformer architecture in their paper called “Attention Is All You Need”. This is what created AI as we know it today.

Every popular AI model like Gemini, ChatGPT, Copilot, Grok, Perplexity, or Claude is built on this Transformer Model and deep learning. So in essence, if you want to know who created the AI that we use today, then the credit goes to the team at Google.