Short answers, pulled from the story.
Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts published the paper A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity in 1943. Their work proposed that human brain neurons could be modeled as simple mathematical units. This paper established the foundational idea of connectionism in artificial neural networks.
Frank Rosenblatt unveiled the perceptron in 1958. The device was funded by the United States Office of Naval Research. This invention was the first implemented artificial neural network capable of adjusting its own connections based on experience.
Seppo Linnainmaa published the modern form of the backpropagation algorithm in 1970. This mathematical machinery allowed neural networks to adjust the weights of connections in hidden layers. Paul Werbos applied this method to neural networks in 1982 and David E. Rumelhart popularized it in 1986.
AlexNet won the large-scale ImageNet competition in October 2012. The network was developed by Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton. This breakthrough was made possible by the availability of powerful graphics processing units which reduced training times from months to days.
Amazon had to scrap its recruiting tool in 2018. The model favored men over women for jobs in software engineering due to the higher number of male workers in the field. The program penalized any resume with the word woman or the name of any women's college.
The Transformer architecture was introduced in 2017. It has become the model of choice for natural language processing. This architecture enables models like ChatGPT, GPT-4, and BERT to understand and generate human language.