AI Compendium · Part III — Illustrated Timeline

draft

The history of Artificial Intelligence from its philosophical origins to the present multimodal and agentic era — told by eras, with dated milestones, the people who achieved them (portraits and photos) and didactic illustrations of each period.

For the 2026 state of the art (recent models, leaderboards), see the doc 08-state-of-the-art-2026.kmd at the end of this part.

The seven eras

direction: right
e0: "Precursors\n—1955"          { style.fill: "#1d3557"; style.font-color: "#fff" }
e1: "Birth\n& Optimism\n1956–1973" { style.fill: "#457b9d"; style.font-color: "#fff" }
e2: "Winters &\nExpert Systems\n1974–1993" { style.fill: "#a8dadc" }
e3: "Statistical\nLearning\n1994–2011" { style.fill: "#457b9d"; style.font-color: "#fff" }
e4: "Deep Learning\nRevolution\n2012–2016" { style.fill: "#1d3557"; style.font-color: "#fff" }
e5: "Transformer\nEra\n2017–2021" { style.fill: "#457b9d"; style.font-color: "#fff" }
e6: "Multimodal &\nAgentic\n2022–today" { style.fill: "#e63946"; style.font-color: "#fff" }
e0 -> e1 -> e2 -> e3 -> e4 -> e5 -> e6
Era Doc Period In one sentence
Precursors 01-precursors.kmd until 1955 The idea of a thinking machine is born in logic and mathematics
Birth & Optimism 02-birth-and-optimism.kmd 1956–1973 AI gains a name, a field and grandiose promises
Winters & Expert Systems 03-winters-and-experts.kmd 1974–1993 Hype, disillusionment, and the pragmatism of rules
Statistical Learning 04-statistical-learning.kmd 1994–2011 Data and statistics surpass hand-crafted rules
Deep Learning Revolution 05-deep-learning-revolution.kmd 2012–2016 GPUs + deep networks + ImageNet change everything
Transformer Era 06-transformer-era.kmd 2017–2021 Attention and scale create the large models
Multimodal & Agentic 07-multimodal-agentic-era.kmd 2022–today Conversational, multimodal AI that acts in the world
State of the art 08-state-of-the-art-2026.kmd 2026 snapshot Granular model timeline + leaderboards + safety/regulation (dated)

How to read this part

Each era follows the same template:

  1. Narrative — the spirit of the period and what changed.
  2. Milestones — a line of dated events (YEAR — event · who · why it matters).
  3. People — mini-cards of key figures, each with a portrait brief.
  4. Era illustration — a scene/infographic brief that synthesizes the period.

🎨 Figure F-III.0 — Master historical frieze. Brief: continuous horizontal frieze (museum "timeline ruler" style), marking the 7 eras in color bands from the palette; over the frieze, miniatures of the milestone icons (vacuum tube, perceptron, Shakey robot, Deep Blue chess pawn, AlexNet cat, Go board, attention symbol, chat bubble); below, medallion-portraits of the central figures aligned to their year.

Historical frieze of the 7 eras

Convention for portraits and photos

Historical figures are real people. Each portrait/photo is declared as a brief with an indication of source and license:

🖼️ Photo F-III.<n> — Name (dates) — role. Source: prefer public domain / Wikimedia Commons; check the license before publishing. Brief: desired framing and context.

Where there is no free photo, use an illustrated portrait in the Compendium style (clean line, monochrome in the #1d3557 palette).