Free About 1 hr0 learners Rev. 2026-10-28 0

In 1770 a chess-playing automaton dressed as a Turkish sorcerer toured the courts of Europe and beat almost everyone it played. Its secret was a human champion folded up inside the cabinet. Two and a half centuries later, people still ask the same question about every clever machine: what is really going on in there?

This course follows the long, uneven road to modern AI. It runs from Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing through the bold forecasts of the 1950s, two bitter AI winters, the expert systems that worked brilliantly and were never used, the day a program found a move no Go master would have played, and the transformer paper that led to ChatGPT. You will see why progress came in sudden jumps after long droughts, and you will finish with practical tools for telling the next real breakthrough from the next round of hype.

Levels

  1. 1 1. Dreams of Thinking Machines 5-question quiz
  2. 2 2. Turing and the Birth of a Field (1936 to 1956) 5-question quiz
  3. 3 3. Early Optimism (1956 to 1973) 5-question quiz
  4. 4 4. Winters and Expert Systems (1966 to 1993) 5-question quiz
  5. 5 5. Learning from Data (1986 to 2011) 5-question quiz
  6. 6 6. The Deep Learning Revolution (2012 to 2017) 5-question quiz
  7. 7 7. Transformers and Large Language Models (2017 to 2022) 5-question quiz
  8. 8 8. AI Now: Breakthroughs, Risks and Rules (2022 to Today) 5-question quiz

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