Infrastructure
3 milestones in AI history
LISP Programming Language
John McCarthy created LISP (LISt Processing), a programming language designed specifically for AI research. Its features — recursion, dynamic typing, garbage collection, and homoiconicity — were decades ahead of their time.
GPU Computing for Neural Networks
Researchers including Andrew Ng demonstrated that GPUs (graphics processing units) could train neural networks 10-70x faster than CPUs. NVIDIA's CUDA platform made GPU programming accessible. This hardware breakthrough removed the computational bottleneck that had held back deep learning.
TensorFlow Open-Sourced
Google open-sourced TensorFlow, its internal machine learning framework. This gave every researcher and developer access to the same tools Google used internally. PyTorch (Facebook, 2016) followed, creating a healthy competition that accelerated the entire field.