How AI Became what it is Today

How did AI go from a codebreaking machine in wartime Britain to ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini? This is the full history of artificial intelligence in 21 minutes, from Alan Turing and the 1956 Dartmouth workshop to AlexNet, AlphaGo, the Transformer and today's multi-billion-dollar AI race. In 2012, a graduate student trained a neural network on two gaming graphics cards in his bedroom. That model, AlexNet, changed the direction of the entire field. But his breakthrough was built on 70 years of ideas: some failed, some were mocked, and some were abandoned and picked up again decades later. In this video: What the Enigma machine and Turing's Bombe have to do with modern AI The Turing Test and where the term "artificial intelligence" came from Symbolic AI vs neural networks: the rivalry between Marvin Minsky and Frank Rosenblatt What caused the two AI winters How backpropagation, GPUs and ImageNet led to the deep learning revolution Why AlphaGo's Move 37 shocked the world How "Attention Is All You Need" introduced the Transformer behind ChatGPT The race between OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Microsoft, from ChatGPT to Claude Code and vibe coding ⏱️ CHAPTERS 0:00 The bedroom that changed AI 1:02 Act I: Code Breakers (Enigma and the Bombe) 1:30 Bletchley Park and Alan Turing 2:33 Can machines think? The Turing Test 3:13 Naming the field: "artificial intelligence" 4:00 The 1956 Dartmouth workshop 4:16 Act II: Two Camps (symbolic AI vs neural networks) 5:13 Rosenblatt's Perceptron (1958) 5:48 Minsky and Papert's "Perceptrons" (1969) 6:23 The first AI winter and the Lighthill Report 7:09 Expert systems and XCON 8:16 The second AI winter 8:57 Act III: The Comeback (backpropagation, 1986) 10:18 How video game GPUs saved neural networks 10:50 Fei-Fei Li and ImageNet 11:58 AlexNet (2012): the deep learning breakthrough 13:23 Act IV: Surprise (DeepMind and Atari) 13:55 Go, and why it was "impossible" for computers 14:26 AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol: Move 37 15:18 "Attention Is All You Need": the Transformer (2017) 16:22 GPT-1, GPT-2 and GPT-3: predicting the next word 17:05 Act V: The Race (ChatGPT, 2022) 17:40 Google's "code red", Microsoft and the AI arms race 18:39 OpenAI vs Google vs Anthropic: three different bets 19:17 Claude Code and AI coding agents 19:50 Vibe coding 20:02 The 2025–2026 mega deals 20:40 What 70 years of AI history teach us 📌 KEY FACTS Enigma had about 150 quintillion possible settings. The phrase "artificial intelligence" first appeared in the 1955 Dartmouth proposal by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon. AlexNet cut the ImageNet top-5 error to 15.3%, against 26.2% for the next-best team. AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol 4–1 in March 2016. ChatGPT reached 1 million users in 5 days and an estimated 100 million in two months. 💬 Which moment in the story surprised you most? Tell me in the comments. 🔔 Subscribe and turn on notifications for more deep dives on AI and technology. ──────────── 📚 SOURCES AND SCREENSHOTS (shown for commentary) Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", Mind, 1950 McCarthy et al., Dartmouth proposal, 1955 Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams, Nature, 1986 Vaswani et al., "Attention Is All You Need", arXiv:1706.03762, 2017 University of Toronto News (2013); Christian Science Monitor (2014); The Next Web (2019); Official Microsoft Blog (2023); Anthropic (2025) Move 37 board: AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol, Game 2 record, British Go Association 📷 IMAGE CREDITS (Wikimedia Commons) Public domain / CC0: Office of War Information; C. H. Parnall (IWM); A. R. Chaffin; TedColes; Daderot; NASA; J. C. Hay and A. E. Murray; Lamune; Hyins; Wilfredor; Joseph Wright of Derby; George Chernilevsky. CC BY: Sethwoodworth (Minsky, CC BY 3.0); Tekniska museet (Shannon, CC BY 2.0); Marcin Wichary (CC BY 2.0); ITU Pictures (Fei-Fei Li, CC BY 2.0); LG Electronics (Lee Sedol, CC BY 2.0); Carl Lender (CC BY 2.0); Abhijit Tembhekar (CC BY 2.0); UnpetitproleX (CC BY 4.0). CC BY-SA: Rama (Enigma, 2.0 FR); DeFacto (Bletchley Park, 4.0); null0 (McCarthy, 2.0); Frank Rosenblatt photo (4.0); Joe Mabel (3.0); Jennifer 8. Lee (Hinton, 4.0); Von.grzanka (3.0); Dietmar Rabich (4.0); Basile Morin (4.0); Brocken Inaglory (3.0); Kritzolina (4.0); Sophie Curtis (4.0); Charles J. Sharp (4.0); Ermell (4.0); Ktkvtsh (4.0); Ivar Leidus (4.0); Juliancolton (4.0); Lucas Kendall (2.0). Licences: creativecommons.org/licenses 🎨 Scenes marked DRAMATIZATION use AI-generated images. Motion graphics and recreated documents are original. #ArtificialIntelligence #HistoryOfAI #ChatGPT #MachineLearning #DeepLearning #NeuralNetworks #AlanTuring #AlphaGo #AlexNet #OpenAI #Anthropic #Claude #TechHistory