The Dartmouth Workshop: The $7,500 investment that gave birth to AI (2/2)

In the second part of our summer series “AI before AI”, FRANCE 24 looks back at the early days of the AI phenomenon. Click here to read Part I on The forgotten Soviet programme. Billions of dollars are now pouring into artificial intelligence, and AI start-ups have little trouble convincing investors to back them financially. But back in 1955, the Rockefeller Foundation rejected a $13,500 request to fund a conference submitted by a young American mathematician who, although promising, was still at the start of his career: John McCarthy. Read moreAnthropic to restore global access to most powerful AI models Rockefeller Foundation administrators balked at approving so much money – the equivalent of more than $160,000 today – to organise a workshop for a field of research that did not yet exist. What was “artificial intelligence”, and why devote two summer months to it at New Hampshire's Dartmouth College? Nevertheless, McCarthy was backed by some high-profile figures and had teamed up with Marvin Minsky, another young mathematics prodigy. The two rising stars managed to convince other heavyweights to join the project. Nathaniel Rochester, who invented the first commercial computer fo...