The history of AI isn’t a modern phenomenon, rather a series of complexed works and research over centuries. Rather, it was hundreds of years of evolutionary journal spanning from theoretical algorithms to machine learning, and ultimately into today’s generative era.
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The Antique Root of AI
With antique myths, stories, and rumors of artificial beings endowed with consciousness, began the history of AI. Philosophical studies in logic and formal reasoning also lay the groundwork for the programmable digital computers in the 1940s. From which, scientists started to question the possibilities of building synthetic intelligence.
The First AI Chatbot
The existence of an AI chatbot isn’t contemporary, indeed, it dated back to the 1960s with the advent of an undeniable groundbreaking invention, ELIZA, the first recognized AI chatbot ever built. Although the logic behind how it worked wasn’t complicated, ELIZA used surprisingly simple pattern-matching and keyword-spotting algorithms to convert user’s generated inputs into open-ended questions, as intended to simulate a psychotherapist.
Modern AI Chatbots Pre-ChatGPT
Previously to ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022, AI was characterized by task-specific machine learning than broad, human-like vibes. Examples for pre-AI boom consist of some AI assistants, such as Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Apple’s Siri.
They were early NLP (Natural Language Processing) models and only capable of following built-in presets of tasks. By categorizing what group of task were users’ inputs belonging to, they could invoke the right script to do those tasks. And if failures in this process appeared, for example, the lack of keywords or there were no matching categories, these virtual assistants couldn’t respond appropriately.