Cultural Moments

3 milestones in AI history

The Birth of AI (1956–1969)

1968

2001: A Space Odyssey — HAL 9000

Stanley Kubrick's film introduced HAL 9000, an AI that could speak naturally, read lips, play chess, and ultimately turn against its human crew. HAL became the defining pop-culture image of artificial intelligence for generations.

Stanley KubrickArthur C. ClarkeMGM

Second AI Winter (1988–1993)

1988

The Second AI Winter Begins

The expert systems bubble burst. LISP machine companies collapsed. The DARPA Strategic Computing Initiative was cut. Japan's Fifth Generation project was failing. Expert systems proved brittle, expensive to maintain, and unable to learn. The AI industry lost billions.

The Agentic Era (2025–2026)

2026.03

AI Agents in the Workforce: March 2026

By March 2026, AI agents were being used in day-to-day operations for coding, research, support, scheduling, and internal automation. Rather than replacing whole teams outright, the clearest pattern was AI taking over narrow but valuable chunks of knowledge work and operating as an always-available teammate inside existing tools and channels.

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Research Breakthroughs Infrastructure & Compute Product Launches Regulation & Policy Competitions & Benchmarks Open Source