Tools
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.
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.
The Rise of AI Agents
By 2025, frontier models were being wrapped in systems that could browse the web, call tools, edit files, execute code, manage state, and carry multi-step tasks forward with limited supervision. Claude Code, OpenAI's Operator, Google's Project Mariner, OpenClaw, and a wave of agent frameworks turned 'AI agent' from a research label into a practical product category.