A brief history of AI

The pri­vate sector’s inter­est in AI has waxed and waned over the years. Its enthu­si­asm about the technology’s rev­o­lu­tion­ary poten­tial has repeat­ed­ly been damp­ened by a lack of both com­put­er
pro­cess­ing pow­er and data with which to train AI sys­tems. But these prob­lems no longer exist.
The vol­ume of mate­r­i­al avail­able has explod­ed – more than 64 zettabytes (64 tril­lion giga­bytes) of data were cre­at­ed last year alone – while pro­cess­ing speeds are faster than the ear­ly pio­neers of AI could
ever have imag­ined. So what hap­pened to get us to where we are today?