Transcript: 

Hello Humans!

And welcome to the podcast that aims to summarise an important AI development in around 5 minutes. My name is Barry Phillips

Today we're doing something a little different. It’s all about dates- just ten dates, ten moments, and the story of how we ended up here. Because if you work in HR right now and AI feels like it came out of nowhere, it didn't.

First date: 1956.

A group of mathematicians and scientists gather at Dartmouth College in the US for a summer workshop. One of them , John McCarthy, coins a brand new term: artificial intelligence. It sounds bold. It sounds futuristic. Most people outside that room don't notice. But that workshop is ground zero. AI is officially a field.

So the American’s discovered or invented AI right? Well yes or maybe no. First there’s a clue in the surname. McCarthy yes you’ve guessed it. John McCathy’s father was from County Kerry. Ok so the Irish can’t claim they invented AI but they can at least say it would have had a different evolution if it hadn’t been for a Kerryman.

Oh and what about the British?

They claim AI is a British kinda of thing. It was Alan Turing, widely considered the "Father of AI", who got busy laying the theoretical foundations of computing and artificial intelligence. He proposed the "Turing Test" in 1950 (originally the Imitation Game) to determine if a machine can exhibit intelligent behaviour indistinguishable from a human. So they claim it was them. They don’t seem to mention though that they through him in jail for being a homosexual. Awkward. That bit got lost to history.

Next date: 1974 to 1980.

Here's one they don't put on the highlight reel. The first AI winter. Funding dries up. Governments lose patience. The promises didn't deliver, so the money walked. It's a useful reminder that hype cycles in AI are not new  and they don't always end well. The technology went quiet. But it didn't die.

1997.

IBM's Deep Blue sits down across a chessboard from Garry Kasparov — the greatest chess player alive. And beats him. The world watches. For the first time, a machine defeats a human at a game defined by strategy, intuition, and pattern recognition. People start asking: what can't machines do?

2012.

A neural network called AlexNet enters an image recognition competition and wins, not by a small margin, but by a Ring of Kerry country mile. It's a technical moment, but it triggers something much bigger. Researchers realise deep learning actually works at scale. The modern AI era quietly begins. Most of the world still hasn't noticed.

November 2022.

Now they notice. OpenAI launches ChatGPT. Within five days it has a million users. Within two months — a hundred million. It's the fastest-growing consumer application in history. For the first time, anyone with a browser can have a fluid, capable conversation with an AI. The doors are open. There's no closing them. But it hallucinates a lot and makes a lot of faux pas – think embarrassing drunken relative at your wedding

March 2023.

GPT-4 lands and it's a different beast. Smarter, more nuanced, able to process images as well as text. The gap between "impressive demo" and "genuinely useful tool" starts closing fast.

February 2024.

OpenAI releases Sora. Type a sentence, get a video. Cinematic, detailed, eerily realistic short films generated from words alone. Visual content creation will never be the same. Ehh Sora has since been withdrawn!

September 2024.

OpenAI's o1 model arrives. This one doesn't just respond; it thinks. It pauses, reasons through a problem step by step, checks its own logic. It's a shift from AI that answers to AI that deliberates.

January 2025.

A Chinese lab called DeepSeek releases a model that matches the best in the world and built for a fraction of the usual cost. The assumption that frontier AI required billions of dollars and US infrastructure? Gone overnight. The field just got more complicated, and more global.

And then finally 2026 onwards.

AI stops being a tool you talk to and starts becoming something that acts for you. Agents. Systems that can log into software, make decisions, complete tasks across multiple platforms,  without a human in the loop. This is the frontier we're standing on right now. And now Open Claw a community for, well, agents so they can communicate and work together and achieve so much more.

Seventy years. Ten moments. And we've gone from a summer workshop in New Hampshire to machines that reason, create, and act autonomously.

So here's the thought I'll leave you with. Every single one of those milestones changed what humans were needed for. The question that should keep every HR leader up at night isn't whether AI will change work. It's whether we'll be ready before the next milestone hits.

Until next week, bye for now!