A closer look
Computer scientist John McCarthy formally coined the term artificial intelligence all the way back in 1956 for a summer research project at Dartmouth College, believing they could solve the core problems of machine learning in about two months. Those wildly optimistic academics genuinely thought they could just buckle down over a summer vacation and crack the code of human cognition with machines that ran on vacuum tubes and punch cards. Almost seven decades later, thousands of the smartest developers in the world are still banging their heads against keyboards trying to get language models to stop confidently hallucinating fake legal precedents and generating images of humans with fourteen overlapping fingers
