How Did We Get Here?

Long before ChatGPT entered our lives, scientists dreamed of machines that could think, learn, and understand the world. That dream gave rise to seventy years of brilliant ideas, bold promises, bitter disappointments, and breakthroughs that transformed science and technology.

In this talk, we'll take a fascinating journey back to the beginnings of artificial intelligence research: from the questions raised by Alan Turing, through early attempts to imitate human reasoning using rules and logic, to expert systems, neural networks, and machine learning. We'll discover why the field experienced periods of tremendous excitement followed by long "AI winters" of disappointment, and what changed in recent decades to make today's revolution possible.

Through stories about the researchers, their ideas, and the mistakes they made along the way, we'll explore how we arrived at a world where computers can write, draw, program, and converse with us about almost anything.

This is more than the history of a technology. It is the story of one of humanity's oldest ambitions: to create something that can think like us.