A brief history of AI
This is not the place, and I am not the writer to go into any great technical detail on AI. But there has been steady and significant development in AI for decades, if not centuries, and a little history is always helpful in understanding where we are now.
Tools that use AI are nothing new. I studied elements of AI at university in the early 2000s, taught by professors educated in the 1970s. Even back in the 1950s, Alan Turing proposed the “Turing test” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test), a way of testing for computing intelligence. As with most recent advances in the computing space, techniques and ideas aren’t necessarily new, but the speed and scale of operating them are.
The world of AI tools is littered with impressive and confusing-sounding jargon and acronyms that often hide something fairly unimpressive. So, especially at this point in the AI hype cycle, it’s useful to unpack some of the terminology you are likely...
