Not a list of what happened in AI but a reasoned map of what the present grew out of: every claim has a source, every date carries only the precision its source will bear, and whatever is not here yet is named as missing rather than invented.
The share each topic holds in a decade, 1939–2026. These are the proportions of what has been collected, not of what happened: the collection begins in foundations alone and opens out into five topics.
September 1940 — February 1, 1942Research · FoundationsLines: Learning theory · Defence
In September 1940 Norbert Wiener offered his services to Vannevar Bush, who ran American war research, and took up the anti-aircraft gunner's problem: predicting where an aircraft will be when the shell reaches it. On 1 December the NDRC let MIT a contract, and with the engineer Julian Bigelow Wiener built a predictor that computed the target's future position from its past course.
1991Milestone · FoundationsLines: Defence · Money and markets
A transport planner built in ten weeks during Operation Desert Shield was in use at US Transportation Command and US European Command through the winter of 1990–91. It reworked plans for moving troops and cargo at the speed at which those plans were changing.
June 1 – 7, 2018Milestone · FoundationsLines: Defence · Safety
On 1 June 2018 cloud chief Diane Greene told staff the Project Maven contract would not be renewed. On 7 June Sundar Pichai published principles in which Google undertook not to build AI for weapons or for surveillance violating international norms.
September 10, 2026Availability · MultimodalLines: Openness
A 552-billion-parameter open-weights model steps away from the decoder-only architecture and, according to the developer, needs a quarter of the HBM and an eighth of the SSD for its cache.