LearnAI

History of AI, How AI Works, and AI Agents.

Three chapters. Pick one to dive in — or just scroll.

01

History of AI

AI Evolution (1950 - today)

Explore 76 years of breakthroughs

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Click any stop to see the breakthrough behind it.

40 stops 76 years
40 milestones

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Generative AI
40 of 40

OpenAI releases GPT-5.6

OpenAI releases the GPT-5.6 model family—Sol, Terra, and Luna—on July 9, 2026.

1950
Alan Turing publishes "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" - Turing Test proposed
1956
Dartmouth Conference - Birth of AI as a field
1958
LISP programming language created by John McCarthy
1964-66
ELIZA - First chatbot built by Joseph Weizenbaum
1976
MYCIN expert system for medical diagnostics developed
1986
Backpropagation algorithm popularized for neural networks
1997
IBM Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov
2002
iRobot Roomba - First commercially successful autonomous robot
2004
DARPA Grand Challenge (first autonomous vehicle race)
Oct 2005
STANLEY AI CAR wins DARPA Grand Challenge
Feb 2010
Apple's Siri launched
Feb 2011
IBM Watson wins Jeopardy!
Sep 2012
AlexNet revolutionizes computer vision
Jan 2014
Google acquires DeepMind
Dec 2015
OpenAI founded
Mar 2016
Google's AlphaGo defeats world champion
Jun 2017
Transformers paper published
Jun 11, 2018
OpenAI publishes the GPT paper "Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training," introducing GPT-1
Oct 11, 2018
Google publishes BERT: "Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding"
Dec 5, 2018
Waymo launches Waymo One, a commercial self-driving ride-hailing service for public riders in the Phoenix area
Dec 2020
Google's AlphaFold solves protein folding
Nov 2022
Release of ChatGPT 3.5
Mar 2023
GPT-4 launched
Mar 14, 2023
Anthropic releases Claude (CloudBot / Claude bot)
Jul 11, 2023
Claude 2 launches and Claude.ai makes the chatbot broadly available
Dec 2024
DeepSeek released
May 2025
Google's Veo 3 announced
Sep 2025
Sora 2 (OpenAI's video and audio generation model) released
Nov 18, 2025
Google Gemini 3 Pro released
Nov 24, 2025
Anthropic Claude Opus 4.5 released
Dec 11, 2025
GPT-5.2 released (OpenAI's response to Gemini 3)
Feb 5, 2026
  • OpenAI GPT-5.3 Codex released
  • Anthropic Claude Opus 4.6 released
Apr 7, 2026
Anthropic announces Project Glasswing and Claude Mythos Preview, a gated cybersecurity-focused frontier model and initiative to secure critical software.
Apr 16, 2026
Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.7, an upgraded frontier model for advanced software engineering, high-resolution vision, and long-running agentic work.
Apr 21, 2026
OpenAI introduces ChatGPT Images 2.0, a new image model focused on stronger photorealism and improved text rendering.
Apr 23, 2026
OpenAI releases GPT-5.5 for ChatGPT and Codex, with GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.5 Pro API availability following on Apr 24.
May 20, 2026
OpenAI announces that an internal reasoning model autonomously disproved the planar unit distance conjecture, an 80-year-old Erdős problem posed in 1946, marking a major AI milestone in mathematical discovery.
Jun 9, 2026
Anthropic releases Claude Fable 5 to the public, introducing a safeguarded Mythos-class model for long-horizon software engineering, knowledge work, vision, and scientific research.
Jul 8, 2026
SpaceXAI launches Grok 4.5, its flagship model for coding, long-running agentic tasks, and professional knowledge work.
Jul 9, 2026
OpenAI releases the GPT-5.6 model family—Sol, Terra, and Luna—on July 9, 2026.
02

How AI Works

Understanding AI fundamentals

Artificial Intelligence aims to mimic human intelligence in machines. Machine Learning learns from data to make predictions (weather forecasting). Deep Learning (face recognition) uses neural networks inspired by the human brain to improve those predictions. Generative AI (LLMs like ChatGPT) goes a step further by creating entirely new content. LLMs means Large Language Models.

How AI Works - Part 1

A classic computer program follows fixed rules written by humans to produce predictable outputs (for example, Excel formulas or a calculator).

Artificial Intelligence learns from data and examples, allowing it to generate answers, adapt, and assist (for example, ChatGPT writing an email or answering questions).

How AI Works - Part 2

An LLM reads your input and predicts the most likely next word based on probabilities learned from massive data.

It generates text by repeatedly choosing the highest-probability word, forming fluent answers like "Paris."

How AI Works - Part 3
03

AI Agents

Autonomous AI systems

AI Agents combine an LLM with tools and memory to think, plan, and decide what to do next.

Unlike simple LLMs that only respond with text, agents can plan steps and take real actions to complete tasks.

AI Agents Explained