No single person invented AI: the field is usually dated to the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, organised by John McCarthy, who chose the name. He proposed the project in 1955 with Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon, and the ideas go back further, to a lecture Alan Turing gave in 1947 and his 1950 paper on machine intelligence.
That's the short version. The longer one is worth knowing, because the name, the meeting and the first running program all arrived within about a year of each other.
The summer that named a field
In 1955, McCarthy was a young assistant professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College when he decided to organise a group on thinking machines, and he chose the name "Artificial Intelligence" for the field. The formal proposal, dated 2 September 1955, asked for a two-month, ten-man study at Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire, in the summer of 1956. That proposal is credited with introducing the term.
Its central idea, as Dartmouth describes it, was that every aspect of learning or intelligence could be described precisely enough for a machine to simulate it. Dartmouth calls the 1956 project the birth of the field, and says McCarthy organised the initial meeting.
The workshop ran for roughly six to eight weeks and was mostly brainstorming, according to Wikipedia's account. It's widely considered the founding event of AI as a field, and many of the people who attended went on to lead AI research in the 1960s.
Before anyone called it AI
The questions were already being asked under other names, such as cybernetics, automata theory and complex information processing, and at earlier meetings like the 1951 Paris cybernetics conference. McCarthy's own FAQ, hosted at Stanford, says that after World War II several people independently began work on intelligent machines, and that Alan Turing may have been the first, with a lecture in 1947.
Turing's 1950 article, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", discussed the conditions for calling a machine intelligent. The idea became known as the Turing test: if a machine could pass as human to a knowledgeable observer, you should treat it as intelligent. That's why some people answer "Turing" when asked who invented AI. It isn't wrong so much as early.
Early milestones, 1950 to 1972
| Year | What happened | Who says so |
|---|---|---|
| 1950 | Turing's paper asks whether machines can think | IBM's timeline; McCarthy's FAQ |
| 1955 | The Dartmouth proposal, 2 September | Wikipedia |
| 1956 | The Dartmouth workshop; McCarthy coins the term | Dartmouth; IBM's timeline |
| 1956 | Logic Theorist by Allen Newell, J.C. Shaw and Herbert Simon, described as the first running AI program | IBM's timeline |
| 1966 to 1972 | Shakey, built at the Stanford Research Institute, the first mobile robot to reason about its actions | Computer History Museum |
| 1967 | Frank Rosenblatt's Mark 1 Perceptron, described as the first computer based on a neural network | IBM's timeline |
Wikipedia adds that the Logic Theorist was presented at the Dartmouth workshop itself. "First" claims in computing history are often argued over, so I've named who makes each one. If the Perceptron row interests you, here's what a neural network is in plain English.
Booms, winters and the modern wave
The path from 1956 wasn't smooth. Wikipedia describes cycles of optimism followed by disappointment, known as AI winters. Growth rose sharply after 2012 with GPUs and deep learning, and again after 2017 with the transformer. I'm not going to add usage figures here; this page is about where AI came from, not how big it's become.
Want AI doing the heavy lifting in your marketing?
I build the systems that handle the boring 80 percent, so you get your week back. Done properly, with the human kept in.
Who invented AI: your questions
Who invented AI?
No single person. John McCarthy named it and organised the 1956 Dartmouth workshop with Minsky, Rochester and Shannon; Alan Turing's earlier work helped set the question.
When was AI invented?
The field is dated to the 1956 Dartmouth workshop. The name was proposed in 1955, and Turing published his machine intelligence paper in 1950.
Who coined the term artificial intelligence?
John McCarthy, who chose the name when organising the Dartmouth project; the 1955 proposal is credited with introducing it.
What was the Turing test?
A test from Turing's 1950 article: if a machine could pass as human to a knowledgeable observer, you should treat it as intelligent.
What was the first AI program?
IBM and Wikipedia name the Logic Theorist, by Newell, Simon and Shaw, from 1956.
If you need it in one line
Say this: John McCarthy named AI, and he and three colleagues launched it as a field at Dartmouth in 1956, building on Turing's earlier work. It's less tidy than one inventor's name, but it's accurate. For the abbreviation itself, see what AI stands for, and for how it works today, our beginners' guide to how AI works.
