The Father of AI?
John McCarthy is called the father of AI. He was an American scientist who actually came up with the name artificial intelligence back in 1955. He also organized a big meeting in 1956 called the Dartmouth Conference where a group of scientists sat down and decided to make AI a real field of study. That meeting is seen as the starting point of AI as we know it. McCarthy also created a programming language called Lisp that early AI researchers used for decades. A few other people are also closely tied to the history of AI. Alan Turing was a British mathematician who in 1950 asked the question of whether machines could think and came up with the Turing Test to measure it. Marvin Minsky helped build one of the first AI labs at MIT. Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio are sometimes called the godfathers of modern AI because they figured out how neural networks work, which is what all of today's tools like ChatGPT and Claude are built on. Hinton won a Nobel Prize in 2024 for that work.