A brief history of AI from ancient times to the present day

Kristy Anamoutou
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AI didn't begin with ChatGPT. For curious minds and history geeks, this narrative podcast traces the history of artificial intelligence as a millennial human adventure across civilizations. From 8th-century BCE Greek automata to the 11th-century African Ifá binary system, from Al-Jazari's Islamic robotics to Japanese karakuri—discover how humanity dreamed of intelligent machines millennia before computers. Each episode (15-20 min) explores AI beyond pure technology: history, culture, philosophy. https://us.histoire-ia.fr/introduction

  1. Jan 18

    6.7 Conclusion — What This Revolution Teaches Us

    What the Deep Learning Revolution Teaches Us: Conclusion and opening toward the future From AlexNet to ChatGPT. From DeepMind to DeepSeek. From Mistral to African-language models. From the AI Act to silicon gardens. Six continents. Fifteen years. What does this journey teach us? Four threads run through it. Exponential acceleration — each year brings capabilities that the previous year would have judged impossible. The global race — AI has become a geopolitical issue where technological alliances reflect political alliances. The concentration of power — a few companies dominate models, data, computing. The ambivalence of creators — those who invented deep learning are among the most worried about its consequences.But each continent also has its singularity. Africa builds its own models. America created the godfathers and the giants. Asia became the center of gravity. Europe invented the rule and made the exception emerge. The Middle East made gardens bloom. Oceania seeks its place. This period leaves us a transformative technology — and the responsibility to shape it. The tools are here. The questions are posed. The choices belong to us. The journey continues — where to, we decide together.

  2. Jan 18

    6.6 Oceania — Archipelago of Innovation

    Archipelago of Innovation: How Australia seeks its place in the AI revolution Australia produces one point six percent of global AI research — but only zero point two percent of patents. The Australian paradox: scientific excellence is not converting quickly enough into economic power. Publications have doubled in ten years. Patents have quadrupled. CSIRO Data61 hosts one of the largest concentrations of AI expertise in the world. But Australia does not have a large language model comparable to GPT-4 or Claude. In December 2025, the National AI Plan tried to bridge this gap. The AI Safety Institute was created. Australia joined the international network of safety institutes. But the Australian choice was different from the European one. No specific AI law. A "light" approach to attract investment. Oceania seeks its place — between scientific excellence and commercialization, between geographic isolation and global connection. The archipelago continues to build its bridges.

  3. Jan 18

    6.5 Middle East — Silicon Gardens

    Silicon Gardens: How the desert became an artificial intelligence laboratory In 2017, the United Arab Emirates appointed Omar Al Olama as Minister of Artificial Intelligence. He was thirty years old. It was a world first. This was not a symbolic gesture. It was a declaration of intent.In 2019, MBZUAI became the first university in the world entirely dedicated to AI. In 2022, Falcon LLM proved the Emirates could compete with giants. In 2024, Microsoft invested one and a half billion dollars in G42, the Emirati champion. AI could contribute ninety-six billion dollars to the Emirati economy by 2030. Israel, for its part, remained the "startup nation." Wiz reached twelve billion dollars in valuation. Nvidia acquired Run:ai. Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI, opened a laboratory in Tel Aviv. Saudi Arabia invested hundreds of billions in NEOM — a futuristic city piloted by AI. The desert has bloomed. Silicon gardens are transforming yesterday's oil into tomorrow's data.

  4. Jan 18

    6.4 Europe — Rule and Exception

    Rule and Exception: How Europe regulated AI and made Mistral emerge from the improbable In 2016, AlphaGo defeated the world champion of Go. In 2020, AlphaFold solved the protein folding problem. In 2024, Demis Hassabis received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. DeepMind, founded in London, had proven that Europe could produce AI excellence. Then came the rule. On July 12, 2024, the European AI Act was published — the world's first comprehensive regulation of artificial intelligence. Europe was choosing to regulate what it did not dominate. But the exception emerged where no one expected it. In April 2023, three Frenchmen founded Mistral in Paris. Eighteen months later, the company was valued at fourteen billion dollars. The three founders became the first French AI billionaires. Europe has drawn red lines — mass facial recognition prohibited, behavioral manipulation banned. It has also proven it can innovate.Rule and exception coexist. History will tell which prevails.

  5. Jan 18

    6.3 Asia — The New Center of Gravity

    The New Center of Gravity: How Asia became the beating heart of global artificial intelligence In May 2023, a Chinese company named DeepSeek was founded. Less than two years later, its models rivaled those of OpenAI — at a fraction of the cost. The world was surprised. It should not have been.China had one million six hundred seventy thousand AI-related companies. It was filing seventy percent of global AI patents. Taiwan was manufacturing ninety percent of the planet's advanced chips — the "silicon shield" that makes the island indispensable. India had become the world leader in AI skills penetration. Morris Chang invented TSMC in 1987 after being "put out to pasture" at Texas Instruments at fifty-four. Fei-Fei Li, born in China, had created ImageNet — the database that launched the deep learning revolution. Parallel paths are converging. The center of gravity is tipping. Asia is no longer the periphery of global innovation — it is becoming its heart.

  6. Jan 18

    6.2 Americas — Godfathers and Giants

    Godfathers and Giants: How America created deep learning and became the theater of the AI race During the winters of artificial intelligence — those periods when no one believed — three researchers persisted. Geoffrey Hinton in Toronto. Yoshua Bengio in Montreal. Yann LeCun in New York. They were nicknamed the "godfathers of deep learning." In 2019, they received the Turing Prize — the "Nobel of computing." In 2024, Hinton received the actual Nobel Prize in Physics. The obstinate ones had transformed the world. Then came the giants. OpenAI launched ChatGPT — one hundred million users in two months. Anthropic proposed safer AI. Google, Meta, Microsoft entered the race. Training costs reached hundreds of millions of dollars. But the godfathers also became prophets of concern. Hinton resigned from Google to sound the alarm freely. Bengio advocates for global governance. The joy of creating mingles with the anguish of what is created. Further south, Latin America leapt forward. Forty percent AI adoption. Argentina saved seventy-two billion liters of water through smart irrigation. Brazil applied AI to agriculture. The Americas created deep learning — and the questions it poses.

  7. Jan 18

    6.1 Africa — The Quantum Leap

    The Quantum Leap: How Africa built its own models and revealed the biases of global AI The electron, physicists say, does not cross the space between two orbits. It disappears from one and appears in the other. A quantum leap.Africa made this leap. In 2007, M-Pesa transformed global financial inclusion from Kenya — before Apple even thought of Apple Pay. In 2023, InstaDeep, founded in Tunis, was acquired by BioNTech for six hundred eighty-two million dollars — the largest acquisition of an African technology company in history. But Africa did not content itself with adopting AI. It reinvented it. Masakhane brought together more than two thousand researchers to create natural language processing tools for African languages. Intron Health developed speech recognition for African accents where Western systems failed. Awarri built the first Nigerian large language model. Timnit Gebru and Joy Buolamwini revealed that facial recognition systems erred up to thirty-five percent more for dark-skinned women. AI is not neutral — it bears the mark of its creators. Africa is no longer waiting to be included in global AI. It is building its own. The palaver tree has gone digital.

  8. Season 6 Trailer

    6.0 Introduction — The Deep Learning Revolution

    The Deep Learning Revolution: How fifteen years upended everything we thought we knew about intelligence On September 30, 2012, in a bedroom at his parents' house, a Canadian doctoral student trained a neural network on two video game graphics cards. Eight days later, his system shattered all image recognition records. The world of artificial intelligence shifted. AlexNet. ChatGPT. AlphaFold. DeepSeek. Mistral. These names mark a dizzying acceleration unprecedented in the history of technology. In fifteen years, AI passed from the laboratory to the daily lives of billions of human beings. Machines learned to see, to speak, to write, to reason. They passed bar examinations. They predicted the structure of two hundred million proteins. They defeated world champions at the most complex games.But this revolution did not have just one epicenter. Africa produced more than two thousand four hundred AI companies. The Emirates appointed the world's first Minister of Artificial Intelligence. France created Mistral, the only credible European competitor to the American giants. China filed four times more AI patents than the United States. India became the world leader in AI skills penetration. You will traverse six continents. Fifteen years of dizzying acceleration. From the laboratories of Toronto to the factories of Taiwan. From the startups of Tunis to the foundries of Abu Dhabi. From the servers of San Francisco to models in African languages.And everywhere, the same question: who shapes artificial intelligence — and according to what values? The godfathers of AI have become prophets of concern. Giants are engaged in a planetary race. Regulators are trying to keep up. The summer of deep learning continues — but no one knows how it will end. Welcome to A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence, season 6. All essays are available online.

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AI didn't begin with ChatGPT. For curious minds and history geeks, this narrative podcast traces the history of artificial intelligence as a millennial human adventure across civilizations. From 8th-century BCE Greek automata to the 11th-century African Ifá binary system, from Al-Jazari's Islamic robotics to Japanese karakuri—discover how humanity dreamed of intelligent machines millennia before computers. Each episode (15-20 min) explores AI beyond pure technology: history, culture, philosophy. https://us.histoire-ia.fr/introduction

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