Who created AI technology? The real origin story of AI (2026)

In the summer of 1956, a small group of researchers spent the summer at a college in New Hampshire trying to work out how to make a machine think. They did not succeed, but they gave the effort a name. So who created AI technology? No single person did. John McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence" in a 1955 proposal for that 1956 Dartmouth workshop, Alan Turing laid the intellectual groundwork in 1950, and thousands of researchers have built on their work since.

That answer is less satisfying than a single inventor's name, so it is worth unpacking. AI is closer to medicine than to the light bulb: a field with founders, not a gadget with a patent. Below we trace where AI came from, who started it, why it took nearly 70 years to reach the public, and what that history tells you about the tools you use today.

Short answer: who created AI?

AI was not invented by one person. John McCarthy named the field and, with Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon, proposed the 1956 Dartmouth workshop that most historians treat as AI's birth. Alan Turing asked "Can machines think?" in 1950. Allen Newell, Herbert Simon and Cliff Shaw wrote what is often called the first AI program, the Logic Theorist, in 1955 and 1956.

Where did AI come from? The background

The idea of thinking machines is old, but AI as a working technology needed one thing first: programmable electronic computers, which arrived in the 1940s. The Open University's history notes that serious AI research started in the mid-1940s, even before digital computers were widely available.

1950: Turing asks the question

Alan Turing's paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", published in the journal Mind in October 1950, opens with a famous line: "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'". Rather than argue about definitions, Turing proposed a practical test, the "imitation game", where a person questions a hidden machine and tries to tell it apart from a human. He also predicted that within about fifty years, an average questioner would have no more than a 70% chance of spotting the machine after five minutes. He was early, but not wrong about the direction.

1955 to 1956: McCarthy names the field

The phrase "artificial intelligence" first appeared in a proposal written in 1955 by John McCarthy, then a young mathematics professor at Dartmouth College, together with Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester of IBM and Claude Shannon of Bell Labs. According to the historical record of the workshop, it begins: "We propose that a 2-month, 10-man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956". Dartmouth's own account quotes McCarthy's core bet, that "every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence" "can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it."

The workshop ran for roughly six to eight weeks in summer 1956. Attendance came and went; only McCarthy, Minsky and Ray Solomonoff stayed the whole time. It produced no breakthrough, but it gave a scattered set of ideas a name, a community and a research agenda. That is why "1956" is the usual answer to "when was AI invented?"

The first AI program

While the Dartmouth proposal was circulating, Allen Newell, Herbert Simon and Cliff Shaw were building something concrete at the RAND Corporation in California. Their Logic Theorist, described in a RAND report in June 1956, proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica, and found a neater proof for one of them than the original. They first "ran" it by hand, with family members and students each holding index cards that acted as parts of the program. It was demonstrated at Dartmouth that summer.

Real examples: AI's milestones in one table

Here is one way to picture it. If AI were a house, Turing drew the sketch, the Dartmouth group poured the foundation and named the street, and every generation since has added a floor, sometimes tearing one down first. The table below shows the main floors.

Two of those rows deserve a closer look, because they represent the two big schools of thought that have competed ever since.

The Logic Theorist was symbolic AI: humans write rules, the machine follows them. The perceptron was the opposite. In July 1958 the US Office of Naval Research unveiled Frank Rosenblatt's perceptron, which ran on a five-ton IBM 704 and, after 50 trials, learned to tell punch cards marked on the left from those marked on the right. Nobody programmed the rule; it learned it. That idea, loosely modelled on neurons, is the ancestor of the neural networks behind modern chatbots.

ELIZA, which Joseph Weizenbaum described in January 1966, showed something else: people readily treat even simple programs as if they understand. It mostly reflected users' words back as questions, yet many people stayed engaged with it anyway. If you have ever felt a chatbot "gets" you, you have felt the ELIZA effect.

Why did AI take so long to reach the public?

Early pioneers were confident. The Open University notes they believed human-level machine intelligence was roughly 20 years away. It was not. Funding dried up in the late 1960s and 1970s, and again in the late 1980s, periods now called "AI winters". Computers were too slow, data was too scarce, and rule-based systems broke when the world did not fit their rules.

The neural network idea survived those winters thanks to a small group of researchers. In 2024, John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton received the Nobel Prize in Physics "for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks". Then in 2017, a team at Google published "Attention Is All You Need", introducing the transformer, the design behind most large language models today. (If the jargon is getting dense, our guide to AI vs machine learning vs deep learning untangles the terms.)

So when was AI introduced to the public? In a sense, everyone has used it for years in spam filters, search and recommendations. But the moment most people noticed was 30 November 2022, when OpenAI released ChatGPT. UBS analysts estimated it reached 100 million monthly active users by January 2023, which made it one of the fastest-growing consumer apps on record. You can read more about the company in our OpenAI review.

Benefits and limitations of the "one inventor" story

We like simple origin stories, and "McCarthy invented AI" is a reasonable shorthand. It gets the naming right, and the date. But it has costs.

First, it hides how collective the work was. The Dartmouth group, Turing, Rosenblatt, Hopfield, Hinton and the transformer team were often working on very different ideas, some of which their peers thought were dead ends. Second, it suggests AI was "finished" at some point, when the field has been rebuilt several times. Third, it can make today's systems seem more inevitable than they were. Neural networks spent decades out of favour before they won.

What we know: the term, the founding workshop and the first programs date to 1955–1956. What remains a matter of interpretation: whether Turing, McCarthy or the neural network pioneers deserve the title "father of AI". McCarthy is the most common answer, and a defensible one, but it is a label, not a fact.

What it means for you

Knowing the history is not just trivia. It gives you three practical filters for the AI news you read every day.

• Be wary of confident timelines. Experts in 1956 thought human-level AI was a generation away. Predictions today deserve the same healthy doubt.
• Remember the ELIZA effect. Fluent text is not the same as understanding. Check important answers from any chatbot against a reliable source.
• "AI" is a family, not a single thing. A spam filter, a chess engine and a chatbot are all AI but work very differently. Our explainers on what AI is and the main types of AI are a good next step.

What happens next

The field McCarthy named now moves at a pace he would not have recognised. Stanford's 2026 AI Index, as summarised by law firm Burges Salmon, reports that generative AI reached 53% population adoption within three years, faster than the PC or the internet, and that industry produced over 90% of notable frontier models in 2025. The same report notes documented AI incidents rose to 362 in 2025, up from 233 in 2024, and that top models still stumble on simple tasks such as reading an analogue clock.

That mix of impressive and fragile would feel familiar to the Dartmouth group. Our guess, and it is a guess, is that the next chapter will be shaped as much by rules and institutions as by researchers, which is why AI regulation is worth following. The question "who created AI?" may soon be joined by a harder one: who is responsible for it?

FAQ

Who created AI?

No single person created AI. John McCarthy coined the term in 1955 and co-organised the 1956 Dartmouth workshop with Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon. Alan Turing laid the theoretical groundwork in 1950, and Newell, Simon and Shaw wrote the Logic Theorist, often called the first AI program.

When was AI invented?

AI is usually dated to 1956, when the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence founded the field. The term itself appeared in the workshop proposal in 1955, and Turing's key paper came in 1950. AI reached a mass public audience much later, with ChatGPT's release on 30 November 2022.

Who invented AI?

John McCarthy is most often called the inventor or "father" of AI because he named it and organised its founding workshop. Others with a strong claim include Alan Turing, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon. Modern AI also owes much to neural network pioneers such as Frank Rosenblatt, John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton.

Who started AI?

The four people who started AI as a formal research field were John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon, who wrote the 1955 Dartmouth proposal. The workshop they organised in summer 1956 brought early researchers together, gave the field its name and set the research agenda for the following decades.

Where did AI come from?

AI came out of mathematics, logic and early computer science in the United States and Britain. Its founding event took place at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1956. Key early work also happened at the RAND Corporation in California, the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory and MIT, building on Alan Turing's work in the UK.