Race to AI: the origins of artificial intelligence, from Turing to ChatGPT

In the winter of 1958, a 30-year-old psychologist named Frank Rosenblatt was en route from Cornell University to the Office of Naval Research in Washington DC when he stopped for coffee with a journalist. Rosenblatt had unveiled a remarkable invention that, in the nascent days of computing, created quite a stir. It was, he declared, "the first machine which is capable of having an original idea". Rosenblatt's brainchild was the Perceptron, a program inspired by human neurons that ran on a state-of-the-art computer: a five-tonne IBM mainframe the size of a wall. Feed the Perceptron a pile of punch cards and it could learn to distinguish those marked on the left from those marked on the right.