Karen Hao

It's not very catchy to be fair.

It's really not.

And decades later, he says during a televised debate that I coined the term or no, sorry, I invented the term artificial intelligence and

Because I needed some money for a summer study.

And he was referring to the very summer study in which he gathered up all the scientists to initiate this new discipline in 1956.

And so it's, you know, he admits it right then and there that AI was coined as a marketing term.

And it was meant to be an evocative narrative that would bring in money, but also bring in scientists because they wanted to rally a bunch of scientists around this new ambitious concept.

And that idea of recreating the human mind, recreating human intelligence has now perpetuated all the way to present day with how OpenAI and all of these other companies articulate their purpose.

I mean, you could say that as scientists who probably never imagined the extraordinary commercial supercharging of the technologies that they were developing, that they were ultimately just trying to

explore the human mind.

So what's interesting is there's many different types of people that come to the AI research field or did at the time when it was an academic discipline.

Some people came to it because they were deeply curious about machines and the capability of machines.

Others came to it because they actually thought that it was a vehicle through which to better understand the human mind.

The neuroscience of it.

Yeah, because they were struggling to figure out how does the human mind work?

So we can use neuroscientific approaches, biological approaches, and we could also use computational approaches.

If we could recreate something that appears and acts and behaves like the human mind, does that mean we've actually discovered

the underlying mechanism of our own intelligence.

So there was indeed what's called an AI winter.

Some people will say that there were multiple AI winters, and this term refers to a time when the investment for AI dried up.