History of AI

A comprehensive history of artificial intelligence from symbolic AI and deep learning to the 2019–2025 scaling era, centered on The Scaling Era oral history and the forces that made modern AI possible.

5 sections · 22 lessons

Course outline

Early Paradigms

  1. From Rules to Learning
  2. Perceptrons and Backprop
  3. The AI Winter Pattern
  4. Diagnose an AI Boom

Deep Learning Takeoff

  1. Data Beats Handcrafting
  2. GPUs Change Experiments
  3. AlphaGo and Search
  4. The Bitter Lesson
  5. Choose a Scaling Bet

Scaling Laws

  1. Transformers Parallelize Language
  2. GPT-2 Starts the Era
  3. Scaling Laws Become Forecasts
  4. GPT-3 Shows Few-Shot Learning
  5. Chinchilla Rebalances Scale
  6. Read a Scaling Claim

Product Explosion

  1. RLHF Makes Assistants
  2. ChatGPT Finds the Interface
  3. GPT-4 Raises the Bar
  4. Open Weights Change Power
  5. Agents Need Reliability
  6. Evaluate an AI Agent Demo

Futures and Governance

  1. Inference Scaling Arrives
  2. Data Walls and Synthetic Data
  3. Economics of the Frontier
  4. Safety Becomes Mainstream
  5. The Next Historical Question
  6. Build a 2028 AI Scenario

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