How did we get to ChatGPT? The inventions, ideas and rules that made today’s AI, from the first electronic switches to reasoning models. Follow what each milestone built on and what it led to, right up to our news.
100 milestones · 1904 to today · each checked in at least 2 sources
When it happened
Each square is one decade. The brighter the square, the more milestones of that kind: progress was slow for decades, then sped up. Choose a theme to see only its milestones, or a decade to jump to it.
Milestones per theme per decade, from the 1900s to the 2020s
John Ambrose Fleming built a glass bulb with a hot filament and a metal plate that lets current pass one way only. The bulb could detect radio signals, and Fleming filed a patent for this “oscillation valve” on 16 November 1904.
Why it matters It detected Morse-code radio signals right away and laid the foundation for electronics.
Note Fleming had studied current flow in light bulbs (the Edison effect) since the 1880s, so the idea was not new in 1904. The patent was filed on 16 November 1904; a Science Museum record says Fleming used a valve in October 1904.
American inventor Lee De Forest put a wire grid between the filament and the plate of a vacuum tube and named it the Audion. A small signal on the grid controlled a larger current, so the tube could amplify weak signals.
Why it matters It became the first widely available electronic amplifier and changed telephone and radio technology.
Note De Forest showed his first Audion in October 1906; the grid patent was filed in January 1907 and describes a radio detector. Sources disagree on whether De Forest knew Fleming’s valve. Robert von Lieben patented a different amplifying tube in 1906.
In December 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain built a point-contact transistor from germanium at Bell Labs. Their group, led by William Shockley, made a device that amplified signals, widely credited as the first transistor.
Why it matters Transistors replaced vacuum tubes and relays, and later made integrated circuits and the information age possible.
Note Sources name different days: 16 December (the first working amplifier) and 23 December (the demonstration to Bell Labs managers). The public announcement came on 30 June 1948. Julius Lilienfeld had patented field-effect designs from 1925.
On 12 September 1958, Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments showed a working circuit built on one bar of germanium. In July 1959, Robert Noyce of Fairchild filed a patent for a silicon chip design that could be made in large numbers.
Why it matters It ended the wiring of thousands of parts by hand and made later electronics much smaller, cheaper and more powerful.
Note IEEE and others credit Kilby with the first working integrated circuit, but several labs were working on the idea. Noyce’s silicon design was the practical form, and both are called co-inventors.
On 19 April 1965, Gordon Moore wrote in Electronics magazine that the number of parts on a chip would double about every year. Moore said falling costs could put as many as 65,000 parts on one chip by 1975.
Why it matters The idea, later called Moore’s law, set the pace of the chip industry; in 1975 Moore slowed the forecast to every two years.
In November 1971, Intel announced the 4004, widely credited as the first commercial microprocessor: a whole processor on one chip. It began as a chip set for a Busicom calculator.
Why it matters It made computing cheaper and smaller, a step Intel says helped start the modern information age.
Note “First” depends on the definition: the MP944 chip set (about 1970, for the F-14 jet) and Four-Phase’s AL1 (1969) came earlier. IEEE Spectrum credits the 4004 if “microprocessor” means a programmable CPU on one chip.
On 26 April 1985, the first ARM1 chip arrived at Acorn Computers from VLSI Technology and worked the same day. Sophie Wilson designed its instruction set, and Steve Furber its architecture.
Why it matters Its small, low-power design grew into the ARM architecture, spun out as a company in 1990 and now found in nearly every smartphone.
Note Some museum pages call ARM1 the first commercial RISC processor; we claim only that it was the first ARM chip.
Nvidia launched the GeForce 256 graphics chip in 1999 and called it the world’s first GPU. It did the 3D shape and lighting calculations itself, which took work off the main processor.
Why it matters Nvidia made the name GPU famous, and GPUs later helped researchers train neural networks much faster.
Note “First GPU” is Nvidia’s own marketing claim: Jon Peddie notes that 3Dlabs and professional cards had similar engines earlier. Sources give August or October 1999, so only the year is shown.
In November 2006, Nvidia unveiled CUDA, a way for programmers to run general code on its graphics chips. A test version followed in February 2007, and CUDA 1.0 in June 2007.
Why it matters It opened GPUs to science and engineering work, and AlexNet’s creators used CUDA to train their 2012 image-recognition network.
Note Nvidia unveiled CUDA on 8 November 2006; a test version came on 15 February 2007 and CUDA 1.0 was announced on 26 June 2007, the date used here.
At its I/O conference in May 2016, Google announced the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), a chip it built for machine learning. Google said it had already run TPUs in its data centres for more than a year.
Why it matters Google’s own 2017 paper reported that the TPU ran trained neural networks 15 to 30 times faster than the chips it was compared with.
Note Google’s own blog page is dated 19 May 2016, but news reports of the I/O announcement are dated 18 May. We give the month only.
A milestone goes in when it changed what AI can do, the tools AI is built with, how many people use AI, or the rules for AI. It must be at least a year old: newer events are news.
We checked every milestone in at least two sources and read them: the original paper, patent, announcement or law where it exists, and a history source such as a museum, an encyclopedia or a report from the time. We never cite Wikipedia. Many “firsts” are disputed, so we say when they are, and dates are only as exact as the sources agree.
Last checked 4 October 2026. Found a mistake? Tell us, and we will correct it. How we report