History of AI

History of AI

A 72-chapter book about how artificial intelligence actually came to be.

Most histories of AI tell you what algorithms were invented and when. This book tells you why those algorithms became possible — the math that had to be discovered first, the hardware that had to mature, the money that had to flow, the bottlenecks that broke, and the people who happened to be in the right room at the right moment.

The angle throughout is infrastructure-first: every era is shaped by what compute, data, and organizations could and could not do. Algorithms get the credit; infrastructure does the work.

Read it your way

Each chapter stands on its own. Read them in order for the full arc from Boole’s logic to today’s frontier models, dip into a single era, or jump straight to the technologies powering current systems — the connective tissue is in place either way.

Part 1 — The Mathematical Foundations (1840s–1940s)

Proving that human logic, reasoning, and probability can be formalized into mechanical algebra.

Ch	Title
1	The Laws of Thought
2	The Universal Machine
3	The Physical Bridge
4	The Statistical Roots
5	The Neural Abstraction

Part 2 — The Analog Dream & Digital Blank Slate (1940s–1950s)

The transition from biology-inspired analog hardware to von Neumann digital architectures.

Ch	Title
6	The Cybernetics Movement
7	The Analog Bottleneck
8	The Stored Program
9	The Memory Miracle
10	The Imitation Game

Part 3 — The Birth of Symbolic AI & Early Optimism (1950s–1960s)

The Dartmouth consensus, early search algorithms, and military funding.

Ch	Title
11	The Summer AI Named Itself
12	Logic Theorist & GPS
13	The List Processor
14	The Perceptron
15	The Gradient Descent Concept
16	The Cold War Blank Check

Part 4 — The First Winter & The Shift to Knowledge (1970s–1980s)

The failure of early neural networks and the rise of hard-coded Expert Systems.

Ch	Title
17	The Perceptron’s Fall
18	The Lighthill Devastation
19	Rules, Experts, and the Knowledge Bottleneck
20	Project MAC
21	The Rule-Based Fortune
22	The LISP Machine Bubble
23	The Japanese Threat

Part 5 — The Mathematical Resurrection (1980s–1990s)

The silent algorithmic breakthroughs that laid the foundation for modern Machine Learning.

Ch	Title
24	The Math That Waited for the Machine
25	The Universal Approximation Theorem (1989)
26	Bayesian Networks
27	The Convolutional Breakthrough
28	The Second AI Winter
29	Support Vector Machines (SVMs)
30	The Statistical Underground
31	Reinforcement Learning Roots

Part 6 — The Rise of Data & Distributed Compute (1990s–2000s)

The shift to empiricism, enabled by the internet and cluster computing.

Ch	Title
32	The DARPA SUR Program
33	Deep Blue
34	The Accidental Corpus
35	Indexing the Mind
36	The Multicore Wall
37	Distributing the Compute
38	The Human API
39	The Vision Wall
40	Data Becomes Infrastructure

Part 7 — The Deep Learning Revolution & GPU Coup (2010s)

The repurposing of graphics cards for massive parallel matrix multiplication.

Ch	Title
41	The Graphics Hack
42	CUDA
43	The ImageNet Smash
44	The Latent Space
45	Generative Adversarial Networks
46	The Recurrent Bottleneck
47	The Depths of Vision
48	AlphaGo
49	The Custom Silicon

Part 8 — The Transformer, Scale & Open Source (2017–2022)

Scaling laws, attention, and the democratization of AI through open weights.

Ch	Title
50	Attention Is All You Need
51	The Open Source Distribution Layer
52	Bidirectional Context
53	The Dawn of Few-Shot Learning
54	The Hub of Weights
55	The Scaling Laws
56	The Megacluster
57	The Alignment Problem
58	The Math of Noise

Part 9 — The Product Shock & Physical Limits (2022–Present)

Consumer adoption, edge constraints, and AI transitioning to heavy industry.

Ch	Title
59	The Product Shock
60	The Agent Turn
61	The Physics of Scale
62	Multimodal Convergence
63	Inference Economics
64	The Edge Compute Bottleneck
65	The Open Weights Rebellion
66	Benchmark Wars
67	The Monopoly
68	Data Labor and the Copyright Reckoning
69	The Data Exhaustion Limit
70	The Energy Grid Collision
71	The Chip War
72	The Infinite Datacenter

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72 of 72 chapters published.