The Birth of Artificial Intelligence: How the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop Sparked the Modern AI Revolution
Creatix / November 29, 2025 This was our very first article, published on April 30, 2023. Below is an updated version Nearly 80 years ago, long before ChatGPT, autonomous robots, and generative AI transformed the world, a group of visionary scholars gathered in New Hampshire to imagine the future. In the mid-1950s, Dartmouth professor John McCarthy coined the term Artificial Intelligence (AI) to describe the possibility of building machines capable of mimicking elements of human intelligence. Before joining the faculty at Dartmouth, McCarthy studied mathematics at Caltech and earned a PhD in mathematics from Princeton University—an academic path that positioned him at the intersection of mathematics, computation, and emerging theories of machine intelligence. The Bold Idea That Started It All In 1955, McCarthy and Claude Shannon ( the father of modern information theory and a leading researcher at Bell Labs) began discussing a radical idea: a summer research workshop fully dedica...