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AI Timeline: from the 1950s to today
Seventy-five years of artificial intelligence in dated milestones: research papers, landmark systems and the laws and policies that followed. Each entry links to its source.
Last reviewed Oct 3, 2026
How to read this timeline. It is a selection of widely documented milestones, not a complete history, and inclusion is not endorsement. Confirmed marks a paper, law or institutional page that states the fact. Reported marks a milestone whose only source here is the company involved, so the claim is its own. Dates are given to the precision the source gives. Sources are numbered at the bottom.
1950s–1970s: Foundations
- 1950
Turing proposes an “imitation game”
Alan Turing publishes “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” in the journal Mind (59, no. 236, pp. 433–60), asking whether machines can think and proposing a test that later became known as the Turing test.1 Confirmed
- Aug 31, 1955
Dartmouth proposal
McCarthy, Minsky, Rochester and Shannon date their proposal for a summer 1956 research project at Dartmouth “on Artificial Intelligence.”2 Confirmed
- July 1958
The perceptron
The U.S. Office of Naval Research unveils Frank Rosenblatt’s perceptron, an early neural-network machine, running on an IBM 704 computer.3 Confirmed
- Jan 1966
ELIZA
Joseph Weizenbaum describes ELIZA in Communications of the ACM (vol. 9, no. 1), a program for natural-language conversation between a person and a computer.4 Confirmed
- July 1972
The Lighthill Report
Sir James Lighthill’s survey of artificial-intelligence research, written for the UK Science Research Council, is dated July 1972.5 Confirmed
1980s–2000s: Learning and landmark matches
- Oct 9, 1986
Backpropagation paper
Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams publish “Learning representations by back-propagating errors” in Nature.6 Confirmed
- May 1997
Deep Blue beats Kasparov
IBM says its Deep Blue computer defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a match in May 1997.7 Reported
- Feb 2011
Watson wins Jeopardy!
IBM says its Watson system won the television quiz show Jeopardy! in February 2011.8 Reported
2010s: Deep learning
- 2012
AlexNet at NIPS
Krizhevsky, Sutskever and Hinton present a deep convolutional neural network for ImageNet classification at NIPS 2012.9 Confirmed
- June 2014
Generative adversarial networks
Goodfellow and colleagues post “Generative Adversarial Networks” to arXiv.10 Confirmed
- March 2016
AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol
Google DeepMind says AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol 4–1 in a five-game match in Seoul in March 2016.11 Reported
- June 2017
The transformer
Vaswani and colleagues post “Attention Is All You Need,” introducing the transformer architecture, to arXiv.12 Confirmed
- Oct 2018
BERT
Devlin and colleagues at Google post BERT, a pre-trained bidirectional transformer for language understanding, to arXiv.13 Confirmed
- 2018 award
Turing Award for deep learning
The ACM names Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun recipients of its 2018 A.M. Turing Award.14 Confirmed
2020–2023: Foundation models reach the public
- May 2020
GPT-3
OpenAI researchers post “Language Models are Few-Shot Learners,” describing GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters.15 Confirmed
- Nov 30, 2020
AlphaFold at CASP14
Google DeepMind says its AlphaFold system solved a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology, the protein-structure prediction problem assessed at CASP14.16 Reported
- Nov 30, 2022
ChatGPT
OpenAI introduces ChatGPT.17 Reported
- Mar 14, 2023
GPT-4
OpenAI announces GPT-4.18 Reported
- Oct 30, 2023
- Nov 1–2, 2023
AI Safety Summit, Bletchley Park
The UK hosts the AI Safety Summit on Nov 1–2, 2023.21 Confirmed
2024–today: Rules, reasoning models and infrastructure
- Aug 1, 2024
EU AI Act enters into force
The European Union’s AI Act enters into force; its obligations phase in over several years.22 Confirmed
- Oct 2024
Nobel Prizes recognize AI-related work
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.” The Chemistry prize goes to David Baker “for computational protein design” and, jointly, to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper “for protein structure prediction.”23,24 Confirmed
- Jan 2025
DeepSeek-R1
DeepSeek-AI posts the DeepSeek-R1 paper on reasoning via reinforcement learning to arXiv.25 Confirmed
- Jan 21, 2025
Stargate announced
OpenAI announces the Stargate Project, which it says plans $500 billion of AI infrastructure investment over four years.26 Reported
- Jan 2025
U.S. Executive Order 14179
Executive Order 14179, “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” is signed in the administration’s first days and directs the creation of an AI Action Plan.27 Confirmed
- Feb 2, 2025
EU AI Act: first measures apply
Prohibited AI practices and AI-literacy obligations begin to apply.22 Confirmed
- July 2025
U.S. AI Action Plan
The White House publishes America’s AI Action Plan with three pillars: innovation, infrastructure, and international diplomacy and security.27 Confirmed
- Aug 2, 2025
EU rules for general-purpose AI models
Obligations for providers of general-purpose AI models begin to apply under the EU AI Act.22 Confirmed
- Sept 1, 2025
Japan’s AI Promotion Act fully in force
Japan’s Act on Promotion of Research and Development and Utilization of AI-Related Technologies takes full effect.28 Confirmed
- Dec 11, 2025
U.S. Executive Order 14365
Signed Dec 11, 2025, the order sets a policy of a minimally burdensome national policy framework for AI.29 Confirmed
- Jan 22, 2026
South Korea’s AI Basic Act takes effect
The Ministry of Science and ICT announces the AI Basic Act is in force, with a grace period before penalties.30 Confirmed
- June 4, 2026
Canada launches a national AI strategy
Prime Minister Carney launches “AI for All.”31 Confirmed
- Aug 2, 2026
EU AI Act: transparency rules and enforcement
Per the Commission’s timeline, Article 50 transparency obligations and enforcement begin on Aug 2, 2026; later dates follow in Dec 2026, Dec 2027 and Aug 2028.22 Confirmed
Sources for this page
- The Turing Test (entry; cites Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59(236): 433–60, 1950). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. J. McCarthy, M. L. Minsky, N. Rochester, C. E. Shannon (hosted by jmc.stanford.edu).
- Professor’s perceptron paved the way for AI – 60 years too soon. Cornell Chronicle.
- ELIZA—A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man and Machine. J. Weizenbaum, Communications of the ACM 9(1).
- Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey (the Lighthill Report). Sir James Lighthill, for the UK Science Research Council (hosted by Chilton Computing).
- Learning representations by back-propagating errors. D. E. Rumelhart, G. E. Hinton, R. J. Williams, Nature 323: 533–536.
- Deep Blue. IBM.
- Watson and the Jeopardy! Challenge. IBM.
- ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks. A. Krizhevsky, I. Sutskever, G. E. Hinton, NeurIPS (NIPS) 2012.
- Generative Adversarial Networks (arXiv:1406.2661). I. Goodfellow et al..
- AlphaGo. Google DeepMind.
- Attention Is All You Need (arXiv:1706.03762). A. Vaswani et al..
- BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding (arXiv:1810.04805). J. Devlin et al., Google.
- A.M. Turing Award, 2018 recipients. Association for Computing Machinery.
- Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (arXiv:2005.14165). T. Brown et al., OpenAI.
- AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology. Google DeepMind.
- Introducing ChatGPT. OpenAI.
- GPT-4. OpenAI.
- Executive Order 14110: Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. Federal Register.
- AI Index Report 2026, Chapter 8: Policy and Governance. Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI.
- AI Safety Summit 2023. UK Government.
- Timeline for the implementation of the EU AI Act. European Commission, AI Act Service Desk.
- The Nobel Prize in Physics 2024: press release. The Nobel Prize.
- The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024: press release. The Nobel Prize.
- DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning (arXiv:2501.12948). DeepSeek-AI.
- Announcing The Stargate Project. OpenAI.
- America’s AI Action Plan. The White House.
- Outline of the Act on Promotion of Research and Development and Utilization of AI-Related Technologies. Cabinet Office, Japan.
- Executive Order 14365: Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence. The White House (Federal Register publication Dec 16, 2025).
- Enforcement of the AI Basic Act (press release). Ministry of Science and ICT, Republic of Korea.
- Prime Minister Carney launches “AI for All”, Canada’s new national AI strategy. Prime Minister of Canada.