When someone asks, “Who created AI?” they usually look for a single name, such as Thomas Edison, who invented the light bulb, or Graham Bell, who invented the telephone. But unlike them, AI is not a concept created by one man or woman. Instead, it was built over several decades thanks to advances in computing and the efforts of many people. Here’s the real story of who created AI.
Key people who created AI
To properly answer the question “Who created AI?”, we need to trace the roots of artificial intelligence back to the early 1900s. Over the past century, there have been significant milestones in the field that have helped us reach the current era of generative AI and large-scale language models (LLM). However, if you want a simple answer, here are the key people who contributed to the creation of AI.
- Alan Turing: A British mathematician who shaped the idea of AI and laid the theoretical foundations for AI. Alan Turing asked whether machines could think and proposed the famous Turing Test to measure machine intelligence.
- John McCarthy: Computer scientist who coined the term “artificial intelligence” and founded the field at the historic 1956 Dartmouth Conference. He also developed the LISP programming language, which was the basis for early AI research.
- Claude Shannon: Mathematician who co-hosted the 1956 Dartmouth Conference and created one of the first learning machines. Through trial and error, he developed a mechanical mouse that can learn how to navigate mazes.
- Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon: The two built some of the first AI programs, including Logic Theorist and General Practice Solver. These programs showed that machines could perform logical reasoning and solve complex problems.
- Joseph Weizenbaum: Developed ELIZA, the first AI chatbot that simulates human-like conversations.
- Hinton, LeCun, Bengio: Deep learning pioneer who developed backpropagation techniques that allow neural networks to learn from data. This is the basis of today’s AI systems. Jeffrey Hinton won the Nobel Prize in 2024 for his “fundamental discoveries and inventions that make machine learning possible with artificial neural networks.”
- Richard Sutton and Andrew Burt: They pioneered reinforcement learning (RL) used in AI inference models to gameplay AI systems like AlphaGo.
- Google researchers: This is the team that introduced the Transformer architecture (“Attending Is All You Need”) in 2017, which powers nearly all AI chatbots including ChatGPT, Gemini, and more.
The first person to start it all: Alan Turing
British codebreaker Alan Turing was the first person to pave the way for modern AI. He published a landmark paper in 1950 called “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” This paper asked some of the most important questions in the field of AI.Can machines think?He also introduced the famous turning test that was featured in science fiction movies.
This checks whether a machine can have a conversation (via a teleprinter) as convincingly as it can with another human. If the test passes, it is safe to say that the machine exhibits intelligent behavior. Suffice it to say that modern chatbots can pass the Turing test with some ease. Alan Turning may not have built modern AI, but he laid the foundation for it.
Birth of AI: Dartmouth Conference
Later, American computer scientist John McCarthy co-hosted the Dartmouth Conference in 1956 with Claude Shannon, Marvin Minsky, and Nathaniel Rochester and coined the term artificial intelligence. Decades later, we’re still using it. The conference featured several key figures who played a key role in shaping AI as we know it today. It not only laid the foundation for AI, but also defined its goals and how to achieve them.
McCarthy also created LISP, one of the earliest known programming languages used for AI research. It is for these reasons that John McCarthy is known as the father of AI. So if you just want to know who founded AI as a field of study, he’s the one to consider.
The first AI programs: logical theorists and general problem solvers
Two of the attendees at the Dartmouth conference were Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon, who made their “debuts” as logical theorists at the same event. It was one of the first AI systems built in 1955 and was able to solve mathematical problems.
This was the first time a machine demonstrated human reasoning. However, you can only perform one task. Newell and Simon then created a general-purpose problem solver that can perform many different types of problems, showing the world that AI is no longer just a theory. Their work helped shape the practical part of AI research.
How the first AI chatbot and AI Winter were born
After the Dartmouth conference, development and research in the field of AI reached new heights at the time. Government agencies saw the prospects and started investing in such projects. Something like Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, developed in 1964. This was the first example of a chatbot that could reply to people like a real human. However, the response was limited and often just repeated what the user said.
Around the same time, Frank Rosenblatt introduced the first neural network, the perceptron. However, the technology at the time had its limits. Funding for the project was also stopped after Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert published a book called Perceptron. This amplified negative opinions about neural networks, defunded AI research, and ushered in an AI winter.
Resurrection: Backpropagation and neural networks
In the 1980s, researchers such as Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun again made significant advances in the field. They developed a backpropagation algorithm that uses available data to train the network, rather than relying on over-programming. This essentially helps computers learn patterns and data structures just like our brains do.
It also rekindled interest in neural networks and laid the foundation for deep learning, a major component of modern AI model creation.
The people who created modern AI
Throughout the 2000s, advances in algorithms and GPU power enabled the development of large-scale trainable models. Image recognition is also now possible. A key moment occurred in 2012. Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton created AlexNet, a deep neural network that performs significantly better than other AI systems used for image recognition.
This proved that deep learning could outperform traditional AI methods and sparked interest in neural networks. In 2017, a team of researchers at Google introduced trans architecture in a paper called “Attending Is All You Need.” This is what gave rise to AI as we know it today.
Popular AI models such as Gemini, ChatGPT, Copilot, Grok, Perplexity, and Claude are all built on this Transformer model and deep learning. So, essentially, if you want to know who created the AI we use today, the credit goes to the team at Google.
