Artificial intelligence was officially launched as a formal discipline in 1956 during the Dartmouth College workshop. John McCarthy organized this event with support from Claude Shannon and Nathan Rochester of IBM to establish AI as an academic field.
Konrad Zuse constructed the Z3 computer in Germany while Tommy Flowers designed Heath Robinson and Colossus machines in Britain. Atanasoff and Berry also created their ABC machine, and ENIAC followed at the University of Pennsylvania.
Government agencies stopped funding undirected artificial intelligence research in 1974 following criticism from James Lighthill and pressure from Congress. The Lighthill report specifically mentioned combinatorial explosion problems leading DARPA to cancel grants like the $3 million annual award to CMU's Speech Understanding Research program.
Corporations spent over one billion dollars on artificial intelligence by 1985 through internal departments. This spending included major projects like R1 which saved Digital Equipment Corporation $40 million annually by 1986 before over 300 companies shut down or went bankrupt by end of 1993.
Deep learning became the dominant approach for image recognition in 2012 when AlexNet won the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge with significantly fewer errors than competitors. Alex Krizhevsky worked with Geoffrey Hinton at University of Toronto to develop this model after Fei-Fei Li released three million images captioned by volunteers using Amazon Mechanical Turk in 2009.
Several companies including OpenAI and Google DeepMind were founded by mid-2015 to pursue artificial general intelligence. These organizations began serious academic research regarding future AI impact on society following concerns about existential threats raised after 2016.