Given the recent hype around AI one could be forgiven for thinking that it is a recent invention. However, the truth is that it's much older - with some tracing its roots back to ancient civilisations such as the Greeks and the Egyptians. However, many credit the invention of AI to Alan Turing, the famous British mathematician. He invented the “Turing Test” (now legendary in the field of AI) in which he postulated that if a computer could convince a human that it was in fact a real person, then it passes the test. Simple, but almost impossible in reality. Subsequently, the term "artificial intelligence" was founded in 1956 at conference in Dartmouth College.
Many opined that AI had a great future, and off the back of this, secured funding for further explorations. However, it wasn’t all smooth sailing and after repeated criticisms and failures, both the funding and interest dried up; this was known as the first AI winter. Things stayed this way until the 80s when interest was reignited after research in Japan. However, this was followed by another winter when the market for computers collapsed. But again this was followed by an upsurge in research and funding in the 90s with a significant breakthrough being when IBM's Deep Blue defeated the Russian grandmaster chess champion Garry Kasparov.
Today, with the perfect convergence of Big Data, lightning-fast GPUs and massively increased storage capacities AI is taking the world by storm again. Big companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon have embraced AI and have created amazing solutions that just would not have been possible even a decade ago. The future of AI is, indeed, bright.