Short answers, pulled from the story.
The field of AI research was formally founded as an academic discipline at a workshop held on the campus of Dartmouth College in 1956. The workshop was organized by Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy, with support from Claude Shannon and Nathan Rochester of IBM. The term "artificial intelligence" was introduced by John McCarthy at this event.
The Logic Theorist was the first AI program, created in 1955 by Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon, with help from J. C. Shaw. It was presented at the 1956 Dartmouth workshop. The program eventually proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica and found new, more elegant proofs for some of them.
The first AI winter was caused by a combination of unmet predictions, funding cuts, and critical reports. In 1973, the Lighthill report condemned AI's failure to achieve its "grandiose objectives" and led to the dismantling of AI research in the UK. DARPA canceled an annual $3 million grant to Carnegie Mellon University after being disappointed with speech research results. The National Research Council ended all support for machine translation after spending $20 million.
The AI industry grew from a few million dollars in 1980 to billions of dollars in 1988. By 1985, corporations around the world were spending over a billion dollars on AI annually. In 1981, the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry alone set aside $850 million for its Fifth Generation computer project.
AlexNet, a deep learning model developed by Alex Krizhevsky working with Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto, won the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge in 2012 with significantly fewer errors than the second-place winner. It marked a turning point: over the following years, dozens of other approaches to image recognition were abandoned in favor of deep learning, triggering a boom in AI investment and capabilities.
The alignment problem refers to the challenge of ensuring that an AI's goal function matches the goals of its owner and humanity in general. The concern is that if a machine's goals are even slightly misspecified, it may cause serious harm in the process of achieving them. Nick Bostrom's 2014 book Superintelligence made this concern widely known, and the term "value alignment problem" emerged from that discussion. The problem became a serious field of academic study after 2016.