Everything to Know About Artificial Intelligence, or AI - The New York Times

Let's start at the beginning. The term "artificial intelligence" gets tossed around a lot to describe robots, self-driving cars, facial recognition technology and almost anything else that seems vaguely futuristic. A group of academics coined the term in the late 1950s as they set out to build a machine that could do anything the human brain could do -- skills like reasoning, problem-solving, learning new tasks and communicating using natural language. Progress was relatively slow until around 2012, when a single idea shifted the entire field. It was called a neural network.