This premiere episode provides a comprehensive history of artificial intelligence development from the 1950s through the present day, tracing the cycles of excitement and disappointment ("summers and winters") that led to today's breakthrough moment with large language models. The hosts establish this historical foundation to set up their season-long exploration of AI interpretability—the challenge of understanding how these increasingly powerful systems actually work internally, comparing it to doing "biology for a system we've created that we don't understand."

Credits

• Cover Art by Brianna Williams
• TMOM Intro Music by Danny Meza

A special thank you to these talented artists for their contributions to the show.

Links and References

1. Samuel Butler (1863) - Letter "Darwin Among the Machines" published in New Zealand newspaper, book "Erewhon"

• Reference: Butler, S. (1863). "Darwin Among the Machines." The Press, Christchurch, New Zealand. 

• Darwin among the Machines

• Erewhon

2. Dartmouth Summer Research Project (1956) - Founding conference of AI research led by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, and Nathaniel Rochester

• Reference: McCarthy, J., Minsky, M., Rochester, N., & Shannon, C. (1955). "A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence."

• The Dartmouth Summer Research Project

3. Marvin Minsky - Co-founder of MIT's AI laboratory, pioneer in AI research

• Reference: Minsky, M. (1961). "Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence"

• Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence

4. David Chalmers - David Chalmers is a philosopher best known for formulating the "hard problem of consciousness"

• David Chalmers' talk  on consciousness

1. Deep Blue vs. Garry Kasparov (1997) - IBM's chess computer defeating world champion

• Reference: IBM Archives on Deep Blue

• Deep Blue

2. AlexNet (2012) - Breakthrough neural network for image recognition

• Reference: Krizhevsky, A., Sutskever, I., & Hinton, G. E. (2012). "ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks"

• ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

3. ImageNet Dataset - Large-scale image database created by Fei-Fei Li

• Reference: Deng, J., et al. (2009). "ImageNet: A Large-Scale Hierarchical Image Database"

• ImageNet: A Large-Scale Hierarchical Image Database

4. "Attention Is All You Need" (2017) - Google paper introducing transformer architecture

• Reference: Vaswani, A., et al. (2017). "Attention Is All You Need." NeurIPS.

• Attention is All You Need

5. AlphaGo/AlphaZero (2016-2017) - DeepMind's Go-playing AI systems

• Reference: Silver, D., et al. (2016). "Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search." Nature.

• Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search

1. Stuart Russell - "Human Compatible" - AI safety researcher and textbook author

• Reference: Russell, S. (2019). "Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control"

• Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control

2. Fei-Fei Li - "The Worlds I See" - Computer vision researcher, creator of ImageNet

• Reference: Li, F. (2023). "The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI"

• The Worlds I See

1. Dario Amodei - CEO of Anthropic, former VP of Research at OpenAI

• Reference: Anthropic company website and published papers

• Dario Amodei

2. Ilya Sutskever - Co-founder and Chief Scientist at OpenAI (mentioned as one of most cited ML researchers)

• Reference: Google Scholar profile and OpenAI publications

• Ilya Sutskever

3. Geoffrey Hinton - "Godfather of Deep Learning," Turing Award winner

• Reference: Hinton's academic publications and recent public statements on AI safety

• Geoffrey Hinton

Selected List of Concepts Mentioned

1. Moore’s Law - Gordon Moore’s observation and prediction of the rate of increase in integrated circuit density