Short answers, pulled from the story.
Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956. The field has experienced multiple cycles of optimism followed by periods of disappointment and loss of funding, known as AI winters.
Funding and interest vastly increased after 2012 when graphics processing units started being used to accelerate neural networks. Deep learning outperformed previous AI techniques during this period.
Deep Blue became the first computer chess-playing system to beat a reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, on the 11th of May 1997.
Geoffrey Hinton announced his resignation from Google in order to be able to freely speak out about the risks of AI. He notably mentioned risks of an AI takeover and stressed that establishing safety guidelines will require cooperation among those competing in use of AI.
In 2016, Julia Angwin at ProPublica discovered that COMPAS exhibited racial bias despite the fact that the program was not told the races of the defendants. The errors for each race were different as the system consistently overestimated the chance that a black person would re-offend and underestimated the chance that a white person would not re-offend.