The field of artificial intelligence was officially born at the 1956 Dartmouth workshop, where John McCarthy coined the term “artificial intelligence.” Key founders include McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, and Herbert Simon, who presented the first AI program, the Logic Theorist. Alan Turing laid the theoretical groundwork earlier with his 1950 paper and the Turing Test, asking if machines could think. So it’s more a group effort than one inventor. The original founders didn’t complete it at all. They set up the field and built early programs that solved math problems or played checkers, but the tech hit big limits. There were two “AI winters” where funding dried up because results didn’t match the hype. What we use today, like ChatGPT, comes from deep learning and neural networks that really took off around 2012 with AlexNet. That work was led by Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio, decades later. The Dartmouth group laid the vision, but modern AI is a completely different approach built on massive data and computing power they couldn’t dream of.